LD Blog

Upon reflection, I realized that I’d mentioned Og Lindsley [in a missing post] but not given enough infomation about him to permit interested readers to learn more. I’m correcting that in this post.

Lindsley was a student of B. F. Skinner, from whom he probably learned about the importance of frequency of responding as an index of behavior. Based on his work at Harvard with individuals who had schizophrenia, he began discussing what he called “behavior therapy.” After working at Harvard on diverse other projects (including the Experiential Typewriter!), Lindsley moved into education. As a professor at Kansas University, he advocated systematic recording of learners’ behavior and plotting of the data on “standard celeration charts” (see more at Standard Celeration Society) and other practices that came to be known as “Precision Teaching.”

One of my favorite quotes from Lindsley is this:

Children are not retarded. Only their behavior in average environments is sometimes retarded. In fact, it is modern science’s ability to design suitable environments for these children that is retarded….The purpose of this paper is to suggest techniques of designing prosthetic environments for maximizing the behavioral efficiency of exceptional children who show deficits when forced to behave in average environments. [Journal of Education (1964), 147, 62-81]

Although he referred to students with mental retardation, I think it applies quite well to LD. I have sometimes used this statement as a stimulus for essay questions in my classes on LD. We need to devise prosthetic environments–teaching places–that will reduce the disabling experiences that students have.

Henry Pennypacker wrote a nice remembrance of Lindsley for the Cambridge Center; it includes a letter that Lindsley sent late in his life. There is a good biography on the Australian PT site. Also, K. Lake provided a brief biography of Lindsley and a module about PT for a class on learning.