Precision TeachingJammu University2 Year B.Ed.Paper 202/3Sem: II

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One of the most effective teaching strategies for ensuring high levels of fluency and accuracy is Precision Teaching.

Precision Teaching provides regular practise on very specific teaching targets using ‘probes’ to practise and monitor progress towards the target.

Precision teaching uses short practise tasks that teacher completes regularly with the pupil.

Probes have been used for many years to learn in many different skill areas and can take many forms from lists of words to pages of sums.

Probes monitor or probe the extent to which the pupil is accurate and fluent in that skill area. 

Precision Teaching is a method of planning a teaching program to meet the needs of an individual child or young person who is experiencing difficulty with acquiring or maintaining some skills.

It has an inbuilt monitoring function and is basically a means of evaluating the effectiveness of what is being taught.

It can be used in early years, primary and secondary settings and can be applied to areas of the curriculum that can be broken down into clear objectives, e.g.: numeracy and literacy skills.

Theory behind Precision TeachingVygotsky suggested that effective teaching

should be geared towards a learner’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD). Precision teaching encourages us to be very specific about the material used with the child, ensuring that it is within the ZPD.

Precision teaching also draws on learning hierarchy which shows us how new learning needs to be fluent before it can be maintained effectively

Which children might benefit from precision teaching?Children who seem able enough to complete

tasks but are reluctant to try (self -efficacy)Children who appear to know something one

day but not the next (stuck on accuracy – need fluency)

Children who appear to know something in one area but not in another (stuck on maintenance –need to generalize)

Children who are very slow in the production of work (stuck on accuracy- need fluency)

What do I do? Spend 5 to 10 minutes teaching the child/young person the

2 new items using whichever teaching method you think is best.

Using the probe, ask the child/young person to see how many they can get right in 1 minute. This should be a fun activity.

Make note of the number of correct items and number of errors

A note of the errors is made so you can target these for your next round of teaching – keeping the teaching ‘precise’

Record the correct responses and errors on the PRECISION TEACHING CHART

The five basic components of precision teaching 1. Specifying desired pupil performance in

observable, measurable terms: Having decided on the area that teacher wish the

child to start on, a precise target must be set which is both observable and measurable.

2. Recording the performance on a daily basis: This is done using the probes and their

accompanying record sheets. The child should work on the probe for a short

time at least once a day (ideally three times a day), usually for a minute.

3. Charting performance on a daily basis: The teacher records the pupil’s correct and incorrect rate

every time the probe is used, and can then plot this data on a fluency chart.

The fluency chart has a ratio scale that shows the relative increase or decrease in a child’s performance.

4. Recording teacher behaviour or teaching approach in relation to pupil performance: This refers to the planned, systematic changes, which the

teacher might make. For example changes may be made in the use of praise, or in

the nature of the teaching program. Task analysis or task slicing may be used.

5. Analysis of the data to determine:(i) Whether progress is satisfactory; (ii) Whether changes are needed in teaching

approach in order to maintain or accelerate progress

Origin of Precision Teaching Founder of Precision Teaching- O. R. Lindsley During the 1960s, many of the students and colleagues of

B. F. Skinner moved from basic research laboratories into applied settings.

Most of those who began to apply what had been learned in the laboratory to educational problems created processes and programs based on the findings of basic research.

Using reinforcement schedules, behavior shaping, discrimination learning paradigms, stimulus fading, and other principles and procedures derived from laboratory research, these pioneers created teaching programs and revised them based on measured effects.

When they moved into the classroom, most behaviorists discarded the measurement framework that had proven so useful in basic research laboratories (rate or frequency of response) in favor of the scale used in virtually all traditional educational evaluation—percentage.

Despite Skinner’s conclusion that “rate of responding appears to be the only data which varies significantly and in the expected direction under conditions which are relevant to the learning process,”

Most behaviorally oriented instructional technologists opted to measure accuracy only

Instead of creating programs and “recipes” based on laboratory findings, he emphasized the measurement framework that had proven so powerful for Skinner and his associates in the laboratory.

He created the “Standard Behavior Chart” (Standard Celeration Chart), a graph for charting behavior frequency (or rate) against calendar days

The Standard Behavior Chart proved to be an important contribution to the study of learning and performance.

Its logarithmic or “multiply-divide” count per minute scale along the left axis enabled students and teachers to chart and directly assess ratios of correct and error frequencies, and to view and quantify progress in the form of straight-line trends rather than “learning curves” formed by sequences of daily frequency measures on the chart.

By using daily charts, teachers and students were able to make timely decisions about the effectiveness of methods and materials in helping students to achieve defined performance goals.

Precision Teaching Philosophy and Strategies A key element of Precision Teaching is the maxim

that “the child knows best”. Based on Skinner’s famous statement that “the

organism is always right,” Lindsley taught Precision Teachers to assume that learners respond in lawful ways to environmental variables and that if learners behave in an undesirable way it is the responsibility of teachers to alter those variables until they produce the desired result.

Daily measurement of performance was another important element of Precision Teaching from the beginning.

Current Efforts and Future Trends Precision Teaching as a “movement” is still quite

small in the context of mainstream education. One factor that may have prevented widespread

adoption is that it has been developed primarily by practitioners, not by academics.

Consequently, there have been relatively few publications about Precision Teaching because teachers, unlike academics, have neither the interest nor tangible incentives for publication.

The result, after a quarter of a century, is a relatively mature and extremely potent set of discoveries and practices that are not widely acknowledged or accepted in the academic community.

A number of commercially available computer based programs for instruction, for authoring and delivering instruction, and for charting and decision-making have been based on Precision Teaching principles and procedures.