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. 1999 Spring;22(1):5–16. doi: 10.1007/BF03391973

Is the learn unit a fundamental measure of pedagogy?

R Douglas Greer, Sally Hogin McDonough
PMCID: PMC2731322  PMID: 22478317

Abstract

We propose a measure of teaching, the learn unit, that explicitly describes the interaction between teachers and their students. The theoretical, educational research, and applied behavior analysis literatures all converge on the learn unit as a fundamental measure of teaching. The theoretical literature proposes the construct of the interlocking operant and embraces verbal behavior, social interaction, and translations of psychological constructs into complex theoretical respondent-operant interactions and behavior-behavior relations. Research findings in education and applied behavior analysis on engaged academic time, opportunity to respond, active student responding, teacher-student responding, student-teacher responding, tutor-tutee responding, tutee-tutor responding, and verbal episodes between individuals all support a measure of interlocking responses. More recently, research analyzing the components of both the students' and teachers' behavior suggests that the learn unit is the strongest predictor of effective teaching. Finally, we propose applications of the learn unit to other issues in pedagogy not yet researched and the relation of learn units to the verbal behavior of students.

Keywords: operant, three-term contingency, opportunity to respond, pedagogical measurement unit, interlocking operants, cost-benefit analyses

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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