Review of the Response Mode Issue
Sigmund Tobias · Review of Educational Research · 1973
This paper reviews some of the investigations concerned with th effectiveness of different modes of responding to programmed and .-;11,pt.te!-assisted 'riLteuci'on. The findings suggest that when stLev:nt familiarity with program (,Iitent is low, or when there is little p ogram redundancy as determned by the blackout ratio, constructing responses leads to higher achievement. Problems with the use of the blackout ratio a,e discussed. Final?y, it is suggested that the greater effectiveness of constructing responses in some cases may be a function of the fact that students are forced to attend to the instructional material for longer periods of time than in other response modes. REVIEW OF THE RESPONSE MODE ISSUE1 Sigmund Tobias Florida State University One of the major ways in which programmed instructional material differs from other instructional resources is the fact that students are required to respond actively to the program. Depending upon the particular program, students may respond by constructing their answer, by picking frc...: a number of available alternatives, or by some combination of these. In addition to the fact that overt responding is a distinctive feature of programmed instruction (PI), making overt responses is of obvious importance to the learning principles on which linear modes of PIs are based (Skinner, 1950). It is, thus, no accident that the importance of making overt responses to PI was one of the first issues to be widely studied by a number.of 'investigators. This area of research has become identified ; 7 as the response mode issue, and it is the purpose of this paper to review some of these studies, discuss the formulations advanced to explain the discrepant research findings, and suggest several hypotheses regarding the importance of overt responding arising from recent research, kesearch Findings Investigations in which the response mode issue has been studied are conducted with research designs such as the following: A program is administered to one group of subjects in the standard fashion; for other groups the response component of each frame is altered in one of a number of ways. In one variation, the required response blank is filled in creating a series of frames which the subjects are required to read without making any overt responses. This mode has come to be known as the reading format. In a different variation of this procedure, subjects are asked. to