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Basic Systems, Inc.

From EverybodyWiki Bios & Wiki




This article documents the role of Basic Systems, Inc. in the surge of interest in instructional technology that occurred in the 1960s.[1][2] Basic Systems, Inc. had been founded by Dr. Francis Mechner and David J. Padwa in September 1960 and was purchased by Xerox Corporation in 1965.[3][4] Mechner had been a Lecturer in Psychology at Columbia University and Padwa was a lawyer.

Programmed instruction and instructional technology

The concept of programmed instruction (also often referred to as programmed learning) and its implications for instructional technology were central to that surge of interest. B.F. Skinner’s 1958 article "Teaching machines"[5] had applied the term to the material presented by the machine. As the machine was soon seen as superfluous, the net outcome, starting in 1961, was a flurry of programmed instruction courses published in the form of self-instructional texts modeled after examples provided by Skinner's writings. These "programmed texts" generally consisted of pedagogically designed sequences of “frames” that contained text with blanks for the student to fill in, and correct answers that the student would find on the next page. Some of these programs focused design attention on how the frames were constructed.[6][7] These programmed instruction courses and the enterprises that promoted them are discussed in the chapters of numerous books that were published in the 1960s.[8][9][10][11] Prominent marketers of programmed texts included Encyclopedia Britannica Films, Grolier Publishing, Tor Education, Teaching Machines, Inc., and Norman Crowder.

But almost none of these programmed instruction courses or programmed texts achieved traction either in schools, government, or industry, and by the early 1970s the entities that had been marketing them had largely abandoned their efforts. The explanatory consensus was that learners found these courses tedious, and trainers found them less effective than the traditional alternatives.

Basic Systems, Inc., however, had taken a different approach to the design of instructional programs. After Basic Systems' acquisition by Xerox, Xerox’s President and CEO Joseph C. Wilson explained to his shareholders at the 1965 Annual meeting that Xerox had acquired Basic Systems (BSI), among other reasons, because, “BSI-designed instructional courses have been among the most successful in the nation.”[12] The industry publication Edubusiness in “A report to management on the education and training market,” wrote, “Basic Systems became one of the decade’s most talked about acquisitions. . . the greatest assembly of bright people under one roof . . . Francis Mechner described as ‘the towering technical person and inventor of behavioral design’ left in 1966.”[3][13] Mechner pointed out that he had been supported by some outstanding behavioral scientists from Columbia and Harvard Universities: Drs. Donald A. Cook, Donald A. Bullock, Stuart Margulies, Irving Goldberg, Lauren Resnick, Charles D. Atkinson III, and Kathleen Speeth.[13]

Joseph C. Wilson's knowledge of educational technology was not due merely to the fact that Basic Systems had been the developer of Xerox's training systems and educational materials. A controlled experiment conducted in 1961 and published by two Schering Corporation executives showed that a Basic Systems instructional program on the treatment of fungal diseases resulted in significantly higher test scores than those produced by traditional sales training methods.[14][13] This study and similar ones persuaded pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Warner Chilcott, Abbott, Merck, Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Upjohn to train their sales representatives with Basic Systems’ programmed instruction courses. The book in which the study was published also presents an illustrative Basic Systems instructional program on corticosteroid physiology.[8]

At the same time, medical schools and the Journal of the American Medical Association had recognized the technology’s applicability to the continuing education of physicians and the education of medical school students.[13][15][16] Starting in 1964, several of Basic Systems’ medical education programs were adopted as part of the curriculum in most of the 91 U.S. medical schools and 1,100 teaching hospitals.[15][16][12]

Basic Systems’ non-medical marketing efforts were aided in 1961-62 when Col. Gabriel D. Ofiesh of the U.S. Air Force, who was also a behavioral scientist with a master’s degree from Columbia University, used Basic Systems programs in studies that supported the programs’ superiority over traditional training methods. These studies led directly to the formation of the National Society for Programmed Instruction.[17] Basic Systems’ industrial clients soon included IBM, AT&T, Univac, Xerox, DuPont, Sperry, Raytheon, Liberty Mutual, and several dozen others.[18] Among Basic Systems’ most widely used programs were Effective Listening and Professional Selling Skills (PSS).[13][19] The latter used the medium of audio-lingual simulated episodes in which trainees were required to respond as if they were participants in the episodes. The same methodology was later used by the U.S. Army to train personnel in Coaching, Counseling, and Leadership Skills.[20] Basic Systems’ non-corporate clients included the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, UNESCO, the OEO, and the OECD.[13][21] In 1964, Basic Systems designed the first behaviorally designed Job Corps Training Center under a contract with the office of Governor Peabody of Massachusetts, and in 1965-66 it designed and operated a model Job Corps Center in Huntington, West Virginia under a contract with the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity.[13][12]

Concurrently with its contract work, Basic Systems had also been developing instructional programs for the school market in several areas of mathematics, logic, physics, dimensional analysis, chemistry, and several topics in biology. These were published and marketed by the academic publisher Appleton Century Crofts, a subsidiary of the Meredith Publishing Company.[22][23]

Dr. Stuart Margulies led Basic Systems’ development of the self-instructional program Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.[13] The program, targeted at beginners, reflects a behavioral analysis of some basic tactical chess concepts. In 1966, after acquiring Basic Systems, Xerox published a hard cover version of that program, and Bantam Books later published the paperback. The program is estimated to have sold over a million copies and continues selling.

Behavioral analysis

Mechner offered his own explanation for the success of Basic Systems' instructional technology in a book chapter.[13] In 1960-62, he had developed a process, which he called behavioral analysis, for designing and testing instructional programs. The original paper describing it is titled "Behavioral analysis for programmers" and can be downloaded from the Mechner Foundation website.[24] Mechner and Dr. Donald Bullock claim to have used that paper in the training of over 100 of Basic Systems' instructional programmers, most of them from Columbia University, in the behavioral analysis methodology.[13][24] The behavioral analysis process was described and referenced in chapters of several books published at that time and in other writings.[25][26][27] Mechner and others also described it, and elements of it, in subsequent publications [13][28][29] including a self-instructional program on behavioral analysis for the training of U.S. Army developers of training systems.[30] In 1971, Mechner testified on applications of behavioral analysis to day care education in hearings of the Senate Finance Committee.[31] The process was also applied in the design of the Sesame Street television series’ instructional sequences in 1970-71 at the time Mechner served on Sesame Street’s original design team, the Children's Television Workshop.[13][25]

These are the steps of the 1962 behavioral analysis process: (1) Identifying and describing the target population for which the instructional program is intended[25]; (2) Specifying the knowledge or skills to be learned[32][33][34] (3) Breaking these down into the skills and concepts of which they are composed, and that the learner would need to master;[25][35][36] (4) Sequencing these into an effective instructional sequence in which the learner makes active responses and receives feedback;[25][26][37] and (5) Conducting several cycles of testing and revision of the resulting instructional program, using representative members of the intended target population as test subjects.[13][38] Indicators that an instructional program is based on a behavioral analysis include concept formation sequences that juxtapose instances and non-instances of concepts,[27][36] and instructional sequences that build target skills systematically with active responding by the learner.[13][39]

Mechner has said that the effectiveness of Basic Systems' instructional programs was due to the application of behavioral analysis in their development.[13] Although the behavioral analysis process makes program development far more expensive and demanding than other methods, he considers application of the process essential for the achievement of adequate instructional quality.[13][39] Basic Systems was able to use behavioral analysis not only because of its knowhow but also in large part because its industrial client base and investment capital enabled it to fund the process' relatively high cost.[13][27] Nonetheless, the main concepts of behavioral analysis found their way into the development of some widely used instructional systems when the required funding was available.[39][40]

Xerox’s acquisition of Basic Systems

In the May 1965 transaction, Xerox Corporation exchanged 45,256 shares of Xerox stock, which had a market value of $6,041,676 at that time, for all the shares of Basic Systems.[4] Xerox then renamed Basic Systems “Xerox Learning Systems” (XLS). In 1966, XLS made the strategic decision to confine its education and training business largely to the marketing of Basic Systems’ Professional Selling Skills (PSS) program,[13] and to reduce the talent-intensive activity of developing instructional programs, which required staff skilled in behavioral analysis. Pursuant to that decision, in 1966, Xerox entered into a contract with Mechner’s company Behavioral Science Applications, Inc. to develop instructional programs in literacy and other basic skills for the pre-school and elementary school levels.[13] In 1972, XLS sold its entire library of Basic Systems’ pharmaceutical and medical education programs to WSI Pharmaceutical Sales Training, Inc., owned by Charles D. Atkinson III.

By 1985, when XLS’s sales of PSS had been at approximately $50 million per year for a number of years, Xerox sold XLS to the L.A. Times Mirror for approximately $117 million,[41][13] and the new company was renamed Learning International.[19]

After 1966, in addition to developing educational products for XLS under his contract, Mechner continued to fund the other pursuits of his Mechner Foundation[42] by founding and building companies based on technological innovation. Among these were Chyron Corporation[43], General Clutch Corporation (renamed RollEase), and Pragma Financial Systems.[44]

References

  1. ↑ Mechner, F. (1970). Interview by B. Walters. The Today Show [Television broadcast]. New York: NBC.
  2. ↑ Xerox Corporation and Basic Systems Planning to Merge. (1965, February 18). New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1965/02/18/archives/xerox-corporation-and-basic-systems-planning-to-merge.html
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 A report to management on the education and training market. (1970, August). Edubusiness, 2(6),1.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Lincoln Rochester Trust Company, (1965, April 22). PROSPECTUS Exchange Offer: Xerox Corporation, 45,256 Shares Common Stock for the stock of Basic Systems, Inc. Rochester, NY.
  5. ↑ Skinner, B. F. (1958). Teaching machines. Science, 128 (3330), 969-977.
  6. ↑ Margulies, S. (1964). Some general rules of frame construction. In S. Margulies & L. D. Eigen (Eds.), Applied Programmed Instruction. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
  7. ↑ Markle, S. M. (1967). Good Frames and Bad: A Grammar of Frame Writing. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Margulies, S. & Eigen L. D. (Eds.), (1962). Applied Programmed Instruction. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
  9. ↑ Lange, P.C. (Ed.), (1965). Programmed Instruction: The Sixty-Sixth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  10. ↑ Lysaught, J.P. (Ed.) (1965). Programmed Instruction in Medical Education. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester.
  11. ↑ Glaser, R., (Ed) (1965). Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning II. Data and Directions. Washington, D.C. National Education Association of the United States.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Xerox Corporation. (1965a). Xerox Corporation 1965 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. New York, NY.
  13. ↑ 13.00 13.01 13.02 13.03 13.04 13.05 13.06 13.07 13.08 13.09 13.10 13.11 13.12 13.13 13.14 13.15 13.16 13.17 13.18 13.19 Mechner, F. (2015). Some historic roots of education reform. In R. Holdsambeck & H. Pennypacker (Eds.), Behavioral Science: Tales of Inspiration, Discovery and Service (pp. 229-252). Beverley, MA: Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.
  14. ↑ Hain, C. H., & Holder, E. J. (1962). A case study in programmed instruction. In S. Margulies & L. D. Eigen (Eds.), Applied Programmed Instruction. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Russell, W. O., & Kolvoord, R. A. (Eds.) (1966) Implications of Developments and Trends in Educational Technology: A Symposium. Chicago, IL: The American Society of Clinical Pathologists, Inc.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Summit, L. (1966b). Education for tomorrow: developments in educational technology related to the continuing education of physicians. In W. O. Russell & R.A. Kolvoord (Eds), Implications of Developments and Trends in Educational Technology: A Symposium, pp. 51-56. Chicago, IL: American Society of Clinical Pathologists, Inc.
  17. ↑ Ofiesh, G.D. (1964). The emergence of Instructional Technology. In G.D. Ofiesh and W.C. Meyer-Henry (Eds.), Trends in programmed instruction. Washington, D.C.: National Education Association and National Society for Programmed Instruction.
  18. ↑ Basic Systems, Inc: A Staff Memorandum, (1962). Present and emerging needs for job training. In S. Margulies & L. D. Eigen (Eds.), Applied Programmed Instruction. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 History in the making: A conversation with Francis Mechner, founder of Basic Systems. (1985). Learning International Exchange, 24, 1-3.
  20. ↑ Mechner, F. (1981b). A Self-Instructional Course in Behavioral Analysis of Interpersonal Interaction Skills (Coaching, Counseling, and Leadership) and Equipment Maintenance Skills. Arlington, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute Publication.
  21. ↑ Mechner, F., & Cook, D. A. (1964). Behavioral technology and manpower development. Publication of the Directorate of Scientific Affairs. Paris, France: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
  22. ↑ Basic Systems Program, (1962a). Chemistry 1: Atomic Structure and Bonding, Teacher’s Manual. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts–Lyons & Carnahan.
  23. ↑ Basic Systems Program, (1962b). Vectors: A programmed text for Introductory Physics, Teacher’s Manual. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts–Lyons & Carnahan.
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Mechner, F. (1962). Behavioral Analysis for Programmers. New York: Basic Systems, Inc.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 25.3 25.4 Mechner, F. (1965a). Science education and behavioral technology. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning II. Data and Directions (pp. 441-507). Washington, DC: National Education Association of the United States.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Mechner, F. (1967). Behavioral analysis and instructional sequencing. In P.C. Lange (Ed.), Programmed instruction: The sixty-sixth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (pp. 81-103). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 27.2 Mechner, F. (1965b). Behavioral technology and the development of medical education programs. In J.P. Lysaught (Ed.), Programmed Instruction in Medical Education (pp. 67-76). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester.
  28. ↑ Markle, S.M. (1970). “Behavioral” analysis of “cognitive” content. Educational Technology, 10(1), 41-45.
  29. ↑ Vargas, E. A. (1988). Teachers in the classroom: Behavioral science and an effective instructional technology. Youth Policy, 10(7), 33-35.
  30. ↑ Mechner, F. (1981a). A Self-Instructional Course in Behavioral Analysis for Developers of Training Materials. Arlington, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute Publication.
  31. ↑ Senate Finance Committee: Statement of Dr. Francis Mechner, President UEC, Inc. Congressional Record of the 92nd Congress, pp.324-331.
  32. ↑ Cook, D. A., & Mechner, F. (1962). Fundamentals of programmed instruction. Columbia Engineering Quarterly, 15(3), 18-21.
  33. ↑ Mager, R. F. (1962). Preparing Instructional Objectives. Belmont, CA: Fearon Publishers.
  34. ↑ Gagne, R.M. (1965). The analysis of instructional objectives for the design of instruction. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning II. Data and Directions, pp. 21-66. Washington, D.C.: National Education Association of the United States.
  35. ↑ Mechner, F. (2017). A behavioral and biological analysis of aesthetics: Implications for research and applications. The Psychological Record. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-017-0228-1
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 Keller, F. S., & Schoenfeld, W. N. (1950). Principles of Psychology: A Systematic Text in the Science of Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century- Crofts, pp. 154-163.
  37. ↑ Mechner, F. (1965c). Learning by doing through programmed instruction. American Journal of Nursing, 65(5), 18-29.
  38. ↑ Markle, S.M. (1967). Empirical testing of programs. In P.C. Lange (Ed.), Programmed instruction: The sixty-sixth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (pp. 81-103). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  39. ↑ 39.0 39.1 39.2 Mechner, F. (1977). A New Approach to Programmed Instruction. New York: Behavioral Science Applications, Inc.
  40. ↑ https://www.headsprout.com/
  41. ↑ Day, K. (1985, April 23). Times Mirror to acquire Xerox Learning Systems. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-04-23-fi-11600-story.html
  42. ↑ http://mechnerfoundation.org/
  43. ↑ https://chyron.com/about-us/
  44. ↑ https://www.pragmatrading.com/


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