New Results of Research Comparing Programmed and Lecture-Text Instruction

Maurice E. Nott, Jr., is a member of the Department of Directed Studies at St. Petersburg Junior College in Florida. He has teaching experience in two-year colleges and junior high school and has taught in-service courses for secondary mathematics teachers. In the past fifteen years programmed instruction has grown from an innovation to an accepted medium of instruction. As the two-year college has gained prominence in higher education, so also has there been a growing demand for programmed materials to use in this area of education. There has been a considerable amount of research on various aspects of this medium, particularly that which compares programmed with lecture-text instruction, but some of the results of this research have been inconclusive. Critics of this research assert that almost none of the studies used time as a factor. At St. Petersburg Junior College, the Directed Studies Department relies heavily on programmed materials for its courses in remedial composition, reading, and mathematics; the mathematics classes use programmed materials exclusively. This college undertook a comparison of the programmed and the lecture-text forms of instruction and included time as a variable in their study.