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Education initiatives, harvard strives to bring its mission of teaching, research, and learning to its surrounding communities—strengthening connections to neighbors and providing education resources for children, families, teachers, schools, and lifelong learners., partnering with public schools.

Project Teach

Project Teach, a program for middle school students in Boston Public Schools and Cambridge Public Schools, aims to demonstrate how college can be an affordable and attainable goal for everyone. The program is based on the research of Dr. Mandy Savitz-Romer of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and focuses on communicating college and career goals, sharing resources, developing partnerships between students and colleges, and engaging families. More than 7,000 students have been reached since 2001.

Eighth-Grade Science Showcase

Codeveloped by the Cambridge Public Schools (CPS) Science Department and Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, this program benefits all eighth-grade students in CPS. Students develop a science project, and the program culminates in a spring showcase on Harvard's campus for CPS, families, and Harvard faculty and staff.

Marine Science Internship Program

Cambridge Rindge & Latin School (CRLS) marine biology students can apply to be placed in Harvard research labs as interns. The program, which was co-developed by CRLS biology teacher Paul McGuinness and Peter Girguis, a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, allows students to be trained and mentored by Harvard faculty and graduate students.

Professional Development for local educators

ScratchEd Meetups for Educators

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create interactive art, stories, simulations, and games—and to share those creations online. ScratchEd and ScratchEd Meetups were designed by a team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, led by Associate Professor Karen Brennan, and have now spread to various locations across the United States. Harvard's Public School Partnerships team convenes meetups throughout the year to support Scratch educators.

James Bryant Conant Fellowship

The James Bryant Conant Fellowship was established to support the professional growth of outstanding teachers and administrators in the Boston and Cambridge public school system who are accepted to Harvard Graduate School of Education degree programs.

Out-of-School Time Learning Community

The Harvard Out-of-School Time Learning Community (OSTLC) provides Allston-Brighton and Cambridge out-of-school time educators with information, promising practices, and tools to support their work in engaging families. Through a series of workshops, attendees learn about research on the relationship between family engagement and improved organizational and student outcomes from birth through high school.

RISE: Reimagining Identity, Self, and Excellence

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RISE started in Spring 2019 as a conference for Allston, Brighton, and Cambridge high school juniors to get a jump start on thinking about life after high school. And in 2020, it expanded to add free, virtual programming in addition to the virtual conference! The goal of these workshops was to help students prepare for life after high school by exposing them to a wide range of careers and building skills for school, work, and life in general.

Mind Matters: Families make a difference

Mind matters.

Mind Matters uses cutting-edge research on early child development to equip families with practical skills and understanding related to the growth of the whole child. With a particular focus on children ages 3 to 8, this program provides families with the resources to support their children emotionally, socially, and academically. Mind Matters is currently offered to families in Cambridge and Boston.

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Supporting lifelong learning.

A faculty-driven and University-wide effort, HarvardX aims to be collaborative and representational of Harvard’s academic diversity, showcasing the highest-quality offerings of the University to learners everywhere. HarvardX provides a form of learning that is useful, transformative, and available for learners at every stage in life. It consists of a variety of online courses that can be audited for free. Students can choose to receive a verified certificate for a small fee.

Visit the HarvardX website to learn more

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The Public School Partnerships Newsletter is a monthly newsletter that connects Boston and Cambridge educators directly to local professional development opportunities, current events, and online resources for learning, exploring, and growing in education. Many featured events and programs are free.

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Sign up for the cambridge newsletter, learn more about harvard's work with cambridge public schools, collaborating for success.

Harvard and Cambridge are inextricably linked through their history and commitment to education. Cambridge students and teachers frequently interact with Harvard students and faculty and Harvard students are often given the opportunity to serve as teacher interns and learn from Cambridge master teachers. This symbiotic relationship yields a flow of new ideas that inform approaches to student learning and educational policy.

Download the brochure: Collaborating for Student Success

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As we all navigate this new “normal” of online working and learning, we have some tips and tricks to share about creating space—physically and emotionally—in your home for everyone to be successful, and to stay sane!

This downloadable document comes in 9 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Amharic, Arabic, Cape Verdean Creole, Haitian Creole, Somali, and Vietnamese.

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The future of teaching and learning

Task force envisions harvard experiences after pandemic innovations.

Over the last 15 months, more than 5,000 faculty members across Harvard have taught online and hybrid classes. The need to transition to digital instruction virtually overnight sparked new ideas and designs and caused faculty to rethink everything about how they taught.

In February, the University convened the Harvard Task Force on the Future of Teaching and Learning to systematically explore how the University can build on the creativity, experiments, and inventions that its faculty applied to remote teaching during the pandemic, and the novel ways they found, during a challenging time, to connect to both its residential and global communities.

Seventeen faculty, leaders, and administrators from across Harvard’s Schools and units comprise the task force, which has been meeting regularly throughout the spring semester, delving into survey data and conducting in-depth interviews to learn more about what kinds of courses, learning platforms, and technological innovations have most effectively reached students. Later this summer the task force will share a report with the University community about their findings, which will address opportunities to enrich teaching and learning, increase equity and access, use digital education to meet learners where they are, and more.

“The pandemic created challenges for teaching and learning that were unprecedented in scope. But it also sparked unprecedented innovation across Harvard,” said Bharat Anand, vice provost for advances in learning at Harvard and Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, who chairs the task force. “What have we learned from these innovations? What hasn’t worked? What has? Where can we plant deeper roots? As educators, our response to the pandemic illuminates myriad ways to offer a better experience to our campus students and an expanded population of learners.”

The task force, formed with the support of President Larry Bacow and Provost Alan Garber, has considered: How can we ensure that we use the experience from this past year to think strategically and imaginatively about the transformative opportunities around teaching and learning across the University? And how can we align this thinking with Harvard’s mission and maximize learner potential?

“Our faculty broke long-held assumptions about online teaching,” said Anand. “There were numerous challenges to overcome, but they’ve also shown that meaningful learning can take place remotely, and that Harvard can achieve broad access at high quality. And the vast majority of faculty say in surveys that they want to bring certain elements of the online experience back to residential teaching.”

The task force is developing learnings, principles, and a strategic blueprint into the report for the Harvard community. It will draw particularly on recommendations from its three working groups. One, led by Bridget Long, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Saris Professor of Education and Economics, has focused on reimagining student learning through blended education. “To maximize the learning experience,” argued Long, “we believe Harvard should change from the default that everything is face-to-face. How might we balance a rich set of in-person and virtual experiences to meet the learning goals and varying needs of different kinds of students?”

The second is developing a unified strategy for short-form digital content that “moves beyond the 50-hour-long course as the default format for online learning,” noted Anand, who chairs that group. The third is helmed by Michael D. Smith, John H. Finley, Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences and former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and has concentrated on engaging, reaching, and impacting audiences around the globe.

“If we were to start an institution like Harvard today, we’d put as much emphasis on digital content and practices as physical ones,” Smith asserts. “Because of what our community achieved in 2020‒’21, we can strengthen the Harvard experience and engage a global population in the pursuit of community, knowledge, and truth. What we learned from the pandemic we can share with the world.”

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InBrief: The Science of Early Childhood Development

This brief is part of a series that summarizes essential scientific findings from Center publications.

Content in This Guide

Step 1: why is early childhood important.

• : Brain Hero
• : The Science of ECD (Video)
• You Are Here: The Science of ECD (Text)

Step 2: How Does Early Child Development Happen?

• : 3 Core Concepts in Early Development
• : 8 Things to Remember about Child Development
• : InBrief: The Science of Resilience

Step 3: What Can We Do to Support Child Development?

• : From Best Practices to Breakthrough Impacts
• : 3 Principles to Improve Outcomes

The science of early brain development can inform investments in early childhood. These basic concepts, established over decades of neuroscience and behavioral research, help illustrate why child development—particularly from birth to five years—is a foundation for a prosperous and sustainable society.

Brains are built over time, from the bottom up.

The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Early experiences affect the quality of that architecture by establishing either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all of the learning, health and behavior that follow. In the first few years of life, more than 1 million new neural connections are formed every second . After this period of rapid proliferation, connections are reduced through a process called pruning, so that brain circuits become more efficient. Sensory pathways like those for basic vision and hearing are the first to develop, followed by early language skills and higher cognitive functions. Connections proliferate and prune in a prescribed order, with later, more complex brain circuits built upon earlier, simpler circuits.

The interactive influences of genes and experience shape the developing brain.

Scientists now know a major ingredient in this developmental process is the “ serve and return ” relationship between children and their parents and other caregivers in the family or community. Young children naturally reach out for interaction through babbling, facial expressions, and gestures, and adults respond with the same kind of vocalizing and gesturing back at them. In the absence of such responses—or if the responses are unreliable or inappropriate—the brain’s architecture does not form as expected, which can lead to disparities in learning and behavior.

The brain’s capacity for change decreases with age.

The brain is most flexible, or “plastic,” early in life to accommodate a wide range of environments and interactions, but as the maturing brain becomes more specialized to assume more complex functions, it is less capable of reorganizing and adapting to new or unexpected challenges. For example, by the first year, the parts of the brain that differentiate sound are becoming specialized to the language the baby has been exposed to; at the same time, the brain is already starting to lose the ability to recognize different sounds found in other languages. Although the “windows” for language learning and other skills remain open, these brain circuits become increasingly difficult to alter over time. Early plasticity means it’s easier and more effective to influence a baby’s developing brain architecture than to rewire parts of its circuitry in the adult years.

Cognitive, emotional, and social capacities are inextricably intertwined throughout the life course.

The brain is a highly interrelated organ, and its multiple functions operate in a richly coordinated fashion. Emotional well-being and social competence provide a strong foundation for emerging cognitive abilities, and together they are the bricks and mortar that comprise the foundation of human development. The emotional and physical health, social skills, and cognitive-linguistic capacities that emerge in the early years are all important prerequisites for success in school and later in the workplace and community.

Toxic stress damages developing brain architecture, which can lead to lifelong problems in learning, behavior, and physical and mental health.

Scientists now know that chronic, unrelenting stress in early childhood, caused by extreme poverty, repeated abuse, or severe maternal depression, for example, can be toxic to the developing brain. While positive stress (moderate, short-lived physiological responses to uncomfortable experiences) is an important and necessary aspect of healthy development, toxic stress is the strong, unrelieved activation of the body’s stress management system. In the absence of the buffering protection of adult support, toxic stress becomes built into the body by processes that shape the architecture of the developing brain.

Policy Implications

• The basic principles of neuroscience indicate that early preventive intervention will be more efficient and produce more favorable outcomes than remediation later in life.
• A balanced approach to emotional, social, cognitive, and language development will best prepare all children for success in school and later in the workplace and community.
• Supportive relationships and positive learning experiences begin at home but can also be provided through a range of services with proven effectiveness factors. Babies’ brains require stable, caring, interactive relationships with adults — any way or any place they can be provided will benefit healthy brain development.
• Science clearly demonstrates that, in situations where toxic stress is likely, intervening as early as possible is critical to achieving the best outcomes. For children experiencing toxic stress, specialized early interventions are needed to target the cause of the stress and protect the child from its consequences.

Suggested citation: Center on the Developing Child (2007). The Science of Early Childhood Development (InBrief). Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu .

Related Topics: toxic stress , brain architecture , serve and return

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• Reports & Working Papers
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Videos : Serve & Return Interaction Shapes Brain Circuitry

Reports & Working Papers : From Best Practices to Breakthrough Impacts

Briefs : InBrief: The Science of Neglect

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Reports & Working Papers : The Science of Neglect: The Persistent Absence of Responsive Care Disrupts the Developing Brain

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The scary truth about how far behind american kids have fallen.

Students of all ages still haven’t made up the ground they lost during the pandemic.

Sometimes, panics are overblown. Sometimes, older generations are just freaking out about the youngs, as they have since time immemorial.

That’s not the case, unfortunately, with kids’ learning right now, more than four years after the pandemic shuttered classrooms and disrupted the lives of millions of children. The effects were seen almost immediately, as students’ performance in reading and math began to dip  far below pre-pandemic norms , worrying educators and families around the country.

Even now, according to a  new report  released this week by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research group at Arizona State University that has studied the impact of Covid on education since 2020, the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic.

The report — the group’s third annual analysis of the “state of the American student” — combines test scores and academic research with parent interviews to paint a picture of the challenges facing public schools and the families they serve. That picture is sobering: In spring 2023, just 56 percent of American fourth-graders were performing on grade level in math, down from 69 percent in 2019, according to just one example of  test score data  cited in the report.

Declines in reading were less stark but still concerning, and concentrated in earlier grades, with 65 percent of third-graders performing on grade level, compared with 72 percent in 2019. Recovery in reading has also been slower, with some researchers finding  essentially no rebound  since students returned to the classroom.

The report mirrors what many teachers say they are seeing in their classrooms, as some  sound the alarm publicly  about kids who they say can’t write a sentence or pay attention to a three-minute video.

“Focus and endurance for any sort of task, especially reading, has been really hard for a lot of teenagers” since coming back from pandemic closures, Sarah Mulhern Gross, who teaches honors English at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey, told Vox.

Meanwhile, even the youngest children, who were not yet in school when lockdowns began, are showing troubling signs of academic and behavioral delays. “We are talking 4- and 5-year-olds who are throwing chairs, biting, hitting,” Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association,  told the New York Times  earlier this year.

If schools and districts can’t reverse these trends, Covid could leave “an indelible mark” on a generation of kids, CRPE director Robin Lake said this week. The effects are greatest for low-income students, students with disabilities, and children learning English as a second language, who faced educational inequities prior to the pandemic that have only worsened today. Covid “shined a light on the resource inequities and opportunity gaps that existed in this country, and then it exacerbated them,” said Allison Socol, vice president for P-12 policy, research, and practice at EdTrust, a nonprofit devoted to educational equity.

The report is the latest effort to catalog what many educators, parents, and kids see as the deep scars — academic, but also social and emotional — left behind by the pandemic.

Earlier this year, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a nationwide testing company,  reported that  rather than making up ground since the pandemic, students were falling further behind. In 2023-24, the gap between pre- and post-Covid test score averages widened by an average of 36 percent in reading and 18 percent in math, according to the NWEA report.

When it comes to education, the effect of the pandemic “is not over,” Lake said. “It’s not a thing of the past.”

Kids are behind in reading and math, and they’re not catching up

Nearly all public schools  in America closed by the end of March 2020, and while  some reopened that fall , others did not fully resume in-person learning until fall 2021.

The switch to remote school, along with the trauma and upheaval of living through a global health emergency in which  more than a million Americans  died, dealt a major blow to students’ learning. Scores on one set of national tests, released in September 2022, dropped to historic lows, reversing two decades of progress in reading and math,  the New York Times reported .

Still, experts were optimistic that students could make up the ground they’d lost. NWEA’s MAP tests, which measure academic growth, showed a strong rebound in the 2021-22 school year, said Karyn Lewis, vice president of research and policy partnerships at NWEA. But growth slowed the following year, and now lags behind pre-pandemic trends.

Kids “are learning throughout the year, but they are doing so at a slightly sluggish pace,” Lewis said — not enough to make up for their Covid-era losses.

A team of researchers using separate data from state tests appeared to find  more hopeful results  earlier this year, documenting significant recovery in both reading and math between 2022 and 2023. But after reanalyzing their data, they found that the improvements in reading were probably produced by changes in state tests, not actual improvements in student achievement, said Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard and one of the leaders of the research team. In fact, though students did gain some ground in math, they showed little recovery in reading between 2022 and 2023.

More recent data does not paint a rosier picture. About half of states have released test results for the 2023-24 school year, and “I don’t see a lot of states with substantial increases” in scores, Kane said.

Many factors probably contribute to students’ slow recovery, experts say. Some may have missed “foundational pieces” of reading and math in 2020 and 2021, Lewis said. Learning loss can be like a “compounding debt,” she explained, with skills missed in early grades causing bigger and bigger problems as kids get older. Chronic absenteeism also remains a big obstacle to learning.  Twenty-six percent of students  were considered chronically absent in 2022-23, up from 13 percent in 2019-2020.

Continue reading at vox.com .

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From Harvard via Moscow to West Berlin: educational technology, programmed instruction and the commercialisation of learning after 1957

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After the Sputnik shock of 1957, the United States initiated education reform, based in part on the hope that technology could facilitate efficient school learning. This development was largely driven by the confrontation between the eastern and western Blocs: on both sides of the Iron Curtain, reformists promoted educational technology for the purpose of better instruction so as to improve the performance capacity of their own societies. The first section of the article focuses on this circulation of knowledge, after which the second section, drawing on the example of Germany, argues that, due to the constellation of interests in the 1960s, substantial organisational and financial resources could be mobilised to promote educational technology. However, when support from political and pedagogical circles dwindled in the 1970s, it became detached from its previous objectives, but was pragmatically advanced in the private sector.

• school reforms
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• programmed instruction
• interest-driven politics

Acknowledgments

I would especially like to thank my interviewees Günter Lobin, Gerhard Ortner and Gerhard Tulodziecki; Volkhard Simons for sharing his memories and pictures with me; Lukas Boser for scanning an unpublished dissertation in Stanford for me; Eneia Dragomir, Michael Geiss, Sebastian Gruenig, Rebekka Horlacher, the editors of History of Education and the two anonymous reviewers for their commentaries on the first version of this text; and Bernard Heise for the translation.

1 All citations taken from: Wolfgang Hochheimer, ‘Erziehung durch Maschinen?’, Spiegel 30 (1963): 69.

2 Jürgen Oelkers, ‘Kybernetische Pädagogik: Eine Episode oder ein Versuch zur falschen Zeit?’, in Die Transformation des Humanen. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik , ed. Michael Hagner and Erich Hörl (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 196–228; Anne Bosche and Michael Geiss, ‘Das Sprachlabor – Steuerung und Sabotage eines Unterrichtsmittels im Kanton Zürich, 1963–1976’, Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 2010 (2011): 119–39; Rebekka Horlacher, ‘The Implementation of Programmed Learning in Switzerland’, in Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems: Between the National and the Global , ed. Daniel Tröhler and Thomas Lenz (New York: Routledge, 2015), 113–27.

3 See Feliy Lill, ‘Roboter: Der bessere Lehrer’, Zeit Online , September 24, 2015, http://www.zeit.de/2015/37/roboter-lehrer-schulen-japan (accessed November 20, 2016); 20 Minuten, ‘Digitales Klassenzimmer: Werden Roboter bald als Hilfslehrer eingesetzt?’, 20 Minuten , October 7, 2015, http://www.20 min.ch/schweiz/news/story/10425325 (accessed November 20, 2016).

4 Larry Cuban, Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 104.

5 Bosche and Geiss, ‘ Das Sprachlabor’, 125–6; Andrea De Vincenti and Andreas Hoffmann-Ocon, ‘Technologische Lenkungsversuche. Der Programmierte Unterricht der 1960er Jahre und die Reformen des Bildungswesens um die Jahrtausendwende im Kanton Zürich’, in Ambivalenzen des Ökonomischen. Analysen zur “Neuen Steuerung” im Bildungssystem , ed. Martin Heinrich and Barbara Kohlstock (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016), 81.

6 Stephen Petrina, ‘Sidney Pressey and the Automation of Education, 1924–1934’, Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 312–13. Bill Ferster, Teaching Machines, Learning from the Intersection of Education and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 59.

7 Robert Reiser, ‘A History of Instructional Design and Technology, Part II: A History of Instructional Media’, Educational Research and Development 49, no. 1 (2001): 55–64; Paul Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology , 2nd ed. (Greenwich: Information Age Publishing, 2004); Barbara Lockee et al., ‘Programmed Technologies’, in Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology , 3rd ed., ed. J. Michael Spector et al. (New York: Routledge, 2008); Ferster, Teaching Machines ; Horlacher, ‘The Implementation’; De Vincenti and Hoffmann-Ocon, ‘Technologische Lenkungsversuche’.

8 The three scientists interviewed for this study, Dr Günter Lobin, Prof. Dr. Gerhard Ortner and Prof. Dr. Gerhard Tulodziecki, were working at the research centre FEoLL in the 1970s. This centre facilitated the foundation of research in educational technology in the Federal Republic of Germany. The three scientists had different positions and pursued other research goals in three different departments. They authorised the excerpts used from the interviews and approved of this publication without looking into my interpretation or reviewing the line of argumentation.

9 Stephen Petrina, ‘Getting a Purchase on “The School of Tomorrow” and its Constituent Commodities: Histories and Historiography of Technologies’, History of Education Quarterly 42, no. 1 (2002): 75–111.

10 Sidney Pressey, ‘A Third and Fourth Contribution Toward the Coming “Industrial Revolution” in Education’, School and Society 36 (1932): 668–72.

11 Lockee et al., ‘Programmed Technologies’, 189.

12 Leslie Briggs, ‘Teaching Machines for Training of Military Personnel in Maintenance of Electronic Equipment’, in Automatic Teaching: The State of the Art , ed. Eugene Galanter (New York: Wiley, 1959), 131–45; Leslie Briggs, ‘Problems of Simulations and Programming in the Design of Complex Trainers’, in Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning , ed. Arthur Lumsdaine and Robert Glaser (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1960), 329–35.

13 Petrina, ‘Pressey’, 326.

14 Arthur Lumsdaine and Robert Glaser, eds., Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1960), 258.

15 John Olsen und Virginia Bass, ‘The Application of Performance Technology in the Military 1960–1980’, NSPI Journal July/August (1982): 34. The contributions to this symposium were published as sourcebooks, see Lumsdaine and Glaser, Teaching Machines .

16 James Finn and Donald Perrin, Teaching Machines and Programed Learning: A Survey of the Industry (Washington, DC: Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1962), 32.

17 Douglas Noble, The Classroom Arsenal: Military Research, Information Technology and Public Education (London: Falmer Press, 1991), 52.

18 Anne Rohstock, ‘Antikörper zur Atombombe. Verwissenschaftlichung und Programmierung des Klassenzimmers im Kalten Krieg’, in Den Kalten Krieg denken. Beiträge zur sozialen Ideengeschichte , ed. Patrick Bernhard and Holger Nehring (Essen: Klartext, 2014), 263.

19 Charles Foltz, Lehrmaschinen. Geräte, Programme, Anwendungsbereiche (Original: The world of teaching machines: programed learning and self-instructional devices) (Weinheim: Beltz 1965), 17.

20 Gerhard Ortner, in discussion with the author, June 9, 2015.

21 John Douglass, ‘A Certain Future: Sputnik, American Higher Education, and the Survival of a Nation’, in Reconsidering Sputnik, Forty Years since the Soviet Satellite , ed. Roger Lanius, John Logdson and Robert Smith (London: Routledge, 2000), 327–63; Andrew Hartmann, Education in the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

22 Science and Technology Policy Institute, The National Defense Education Act of 1958: Selected Outcomes , https://www.ida.org/idamedia/Corporate/Files/Publications/STPIPubs/ida-d-3306.ashx (accessed November 9, 2016); UPA (General Editor Nancy Beck Young), Documentary History of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidency , Vol. 22: The National Defense Education Act (Bethesda: Pro Quest, 2014).

23 Oskar Gandy, ‘Instructional Technology: The Reselling of the Pentagon’, (unpublished dissertation, Stanford University, 1976), 160.

24 Ferster, Teaching Machines, 80.

25 Gandy, ‘Instructional Technology’, 7 and 210; Finn and Perrin, ‘A Survey of the Industry’, 32; Åke Bjerstedt, Educational Technology: Instructional Programming and Didakometry (New York: Wiley, 1972), 38.

26 Private archives of the Worlddidac association [hereafter ArWD], 6th Didacta 1961.

27 Sargent Welch, History of Sargent Welch, https://www.sargentwelch.com/store/content/externalContentPage.jsp?path=/www.sargentwelch.com/en_US/history_of_sargent_welch.jsp (accessed November 9, 2016).

28 Ernest Hilgard and Gordon Bower, Theories of Learning , 3rd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Learning and the Technology of Instruction, 1966), 552.

29 Burrhus Frederic Skinner, ‘Teaching Machines’, Science 128 (1958): 969–77.

30 Tröhler, ‘The Technocratic Momentum after 1945, the Development of Teaching Machines, and Sobering Results’, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 5, no. 2 (2013): 5.

31 Helmar Frank, Kybernetik. Brücke zwischen den Wissenschaften (Frankfurt: Umschau, 1962); Helmar Frank, Kybernetische Grundlagen der Pädagogik. Eine Einführung in die Informationspsychologie und ihre philosophischen, mathematischen und physiologischen Grundlagen (Baden-Baden: Agis Verlag, 1962).

32 Günter Lobin, in discussion with the author, June 10, 2015.

33 Galanter, ed., ‘Automatic Teaching’, Introduction.

34 Günter Lobin, in discussion with the author, June 10, 2015.

35 G. O. M. Leith, ‘Research on Programmed Learning’, Educational Review 16 (1965): 68.

36 Arthur Lumsdaine, ‘Teaching Machines and Auto-Instructional Programs’, Educational Leadership (1961): 314; Alexandra Rutherford, ‘B.F. Skinner’s Technology of Behavior in American Life: From Consumer Culture to Counterculture’, Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences 39, no. 1 (2003): 8.

37 Burrhus Frederic Skinner, ‘The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching [1954]’, in Lumsdaine and Glaser, eds., Teaching Machines , 113.

38 Ferster, Teaching Machines , 75–7.

39 Robert Mager, Life in the Pinball Machine: Observations from an Accidental Life in Learning and Human Performing (Atlanta: CEP Press, 2003), 44.

40 Robert Mager, Lernziele und Programmierter Unterricht (Original: Preparing objectives for programmed instruction) (Weinheim: Beltz 1965).

41 Helmar Frank, Kybernetische Grundlagen der Pädagogik. Eine Einführung in die Pädagogistik für Analytiker, Planer und Techniker des didaktischen Informationsumsatzes in der Industriegesellschaft , Band 2: Angewandte kybernetische Pädagogik und Ideologie , 1969, 2nd ed. (Baden-Baden: Agis Verlag), 183.

42 Andreas Hoffmann-Ocon and Rebekka Horlacher, ‘Technologie als Bedrohung oder Gewinn? Das Beispiel des programmierten Unterrichts’, Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 16 (2014): 172.

43 Similar arguments were made about the history of cybernetics by David Mindell, Jérôme Segal and Slava Gerovitch, ‘From Communications Engineering to Communications Science, Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France and the Soviet Union’, in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History , ed. Mark Walker (London: Routledge, 2003), 66–95.

44 Raymond Stokes, ‘In Search of the Socialist Artefact: Technology and Ideology in East Germany, 1945–1962’, German History 15 (1997): 222.

45 Mindell, Segal and Gerovitch, ‘Communications Engineering’; Hartmut Vogt, Programmierter Unterricht und Lehrmaschinen an Hoch - und Fachschulen der Sowjetunion (Munich: Manz Verlag, 1965); Heinz Lohse, ‘Zur Entwicklung bildungskybernetischer Aktivitäten und Forschungen im Osten Deutschlands 1957 bis 1990 und Beziehungen zur etablierten Forschung im Westen’, in Kybernetik steckt den Osten an. Aufstieg und Schwierigkeiten einer interdisziplinären Wissenschaft in der DDR , ed. Frank Dittmann and Rudolf Seising (Berlin: trafo, 2007), 400.

46 Gerhard Ortner, in discussion with the author, June 9, 2015.

47 Frank, Kybernetische Grundlagen der Pädagogik , 185; Hartmut Vogt, ‘Programmierter Unterricht und Lehrmaschinen im Sowjetischen Bildungswesen’, in Internationale Konferenz Programmierter Unterricht und Lehrmaschinen , ed. Armand Bianchéri et al. (Berlin: Franz Cornelesen Verlag, 1964), 152.

48 Lev Landa, ‘Programmed Instruction in the Soviet Union’, in The Educational Technology, Reviews Series Number Ten, Using Programmed Instruction (1973), 9–14; Slava Gerovitch, ‘Roman Jakobson und die Kybernetisierung der Linguistik in der Sowjetunion’, in Hagner and Hörl, Transformation des Humanen , 229–75.

49 Lev Landa, Algorithmization in Learning and Instruction , ed. Felix Kopstein (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Press, 1974).

50 Lev Landa, ‘Kybernetik und Unterrichtstheorie’, in Erziehungswissenschaftliche Reihe: Aspekte des programmierten Unterrichts , ed. Johannes Zielinski (Frankfurt: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1971), 3–16.

51 Gerhard Tulodziecki, in discussion with the author, June 11, 2015.

52 The history of German computer technology and cybernetics against the backdrop of National Socialism is discussed in: Jon Agar, Turing and the Universal Machine: The Making of the Modern Computer (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001); Michael Hagner, ‘Vom Aufstieg und Fall der Kybernetik als Universalwissenschaft’, in Hagner and Hörl, Transformation des Humanen , 38–71; Jérôme Segal and Frank Dittmann, ‘Hermann Schmidt (1894–1968) et la Théorie Générale de la Régulation, Une Cybernétique Allemande en 1940?’, Annals of Science 54 (1997): 547–65.

53 Lohse, ‘Entwicklung’; Nicole Zabel, ‘Die Lehrmaschinen und der Programmierte Unterricht – Chancen und Grenzen im Bildungswesen der DDR in den 1960er und 1970er-Jahren’, Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 16 (2014): 127.

54 Helmar Frank, ed., Lehrmaschinen in kybernetischer und pädagogischer Sicht 2 (Stuttgart: Klett-Oldenbourg, 1964), 9.

55 Günter Lobin, in discussion with the author, June 10, 2015; Gerhard Ortner, in discussion with the author, June 9, 2015; Gerhard Tulodziecki, in discussion with the author, June 11, 2015. The scarcity of teachers in West Germany emerged due to the fact that by the end of the 1950s elementary school was extended to nine years in all federal states, which led to a need for 11,500 additional teachers (ArWD, 5th Didacta 1959).

56 Johannes Zielinski, ‘Alle müssen mehr und schneller lernen’, in Erziehungswissenschaftliche Reihe: Aspekte des programmierten Unterrichts Zielinski., ed., (Frankfurt: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1971), 69–78.

57 Helmar Frank, Meine Minimemoiren (Paderborn: Reike, 1998), 88.

58 Frank, Kybernetische Grundlagen der Pädagogik , 188.

59 Miloš Lánský, ‘Über wechselseitige Einflüsse bei der Entwicklung der Kybernetischen Pädagogik in West- und Osteuropa’, Grundlagenstudien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft 13, no. 1 (1972): 6.

60 Letter from Felix F. Kopstein to Gordon Pask, March 29, 1974, Archives of Contemporary History Vienna, Gordon Pask Papers [hereafter GPA Vienna], Box 11.28.2.

61 Viktoria Boretska (University of Vienna) is currently writing a dissertation on the history of programmed instruction in the USSR.

62 Following this conference, new research networks were created (Horlacher, ‘The Implementation’, 116 and 122).

63 Carl-Heinz Evers, ‘Vorwort’, in Armand Bianchéri et al., Internationale Konferenz , VIII.

64 Jürgen Wehnert, Paderborner Arbeitspapiere. Die Entwicklung der kybernetischen Pädagogik zwischen 1960 und 1972 (Paderborn: FEoLL, 1978), 11–12.

65 Jürgen Deutsch, ‘Stand der technischen Entwicklung von Lehrmaschinen in der deutschen Industrie’, in Armand Bianchéri et al., Internationale Konferenz , 37.

66 Philipp Aumann, Mode und Methode. Die Kybernetik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Wallstein 2009), 337–9.

67 Barbara Lockee, David Moore and John Burton, ‘Foundations of Programmed Instructions’, in Handbook of Research on Education Communications and Technology , ed. David H. Jonassen (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 545.

68 Universitätsarchiv Paderborn [hereafter UAPB], Nachlass Frank [hereafter NL 8010 Acc. 2014/005], Nr. 161; Frank, Meine Minimemoiren , 98.

69 Gerhard Tulodziecki, in discussion with the author, June 11, 2015; Günter Lobin, in discussion with the author, June 10, 2015.

70 UAPB, FEOLL IFK, Dokumentation Lehrprogramme; Frank, Meine Minimemoiren , p. 97.

71 Christian Berg, Heinz Nixdorf. Eine Biographie (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016).

72 Letter from Heinz Nixdorf to the minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, November 11, 1969, Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen Abteilung Rheinland, Duisburg: NW 615, FEoLL Paderborn [hereafter LAV NRW R 615], Nr. 452.

73 Frank, Kybernetische Grundlagen der Pädagogik , 43.

74 Helmar Frank, Kybernetik und Philosophie. Materialien und Grundriß zu einer Philosophie der Kybernetik (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 1966).

75 Günter Lobin, in discussion with the author, June 10, 2015.

76 Helmar Frank, September 5, 1969, memorandum in support of research and development in the field of educational technology. Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Wiesbaden: Abt. 504, Bildungstechnologisches Zentrum [hereafter HHStAW Abt. 504], Nr. 2038.

77 Statement from Klaus Weltner sent to the editors of b:e [betrifft:erziehung], October 8, 1971, HHStAW Abt. 504, Nr. 6671b.

78 Geschäftsführung [Management] of BTZ, June 8, 1972, report on the tasks and areas of research, HHStAW Abt. 504, Nr. 6671b.

79 Letters from Tiebel to the minister-president, the school councils, and the Oberamt [administration unit] of North Rhine-Westphalia, May 11, 1971, LAV NRW R 615, Nr. 210.

80 Lengers, July 30, 1976, memorandum, LAV NRW R 615, Nr. 210.

81 Founding committee of BTZ, July 22, 1970, interim report, HHStAW Abt. 504, Nr. 2034; Kabinettvorlage [cabinet draft], March 2, 1970, HHStAW Abt. 504, Nr. 6671a; Letters from Frank to Weltner, Lánsky, Schöler, Correll, Koppe, and Zielinski, June 28, 1970, UAPB NL 8010 Acc. 2014/005, Nr. 161.

82 Letter from Klaus Weltner to the culture minister of Hessen, April 24, 1972, HHStAW Abt. 504, Nr. 6671b.

83 Letter from the management of Nixdorf AG to the state secretariat of North Rhine-Westphalia, undated, LAV NRW R 615, Nr. 452.

84 Wiesbadener Kurier, ‘ Keine Dressur mit “ pädagogischem Fertigfutter ”’, July20, 1972.

85 See UAPB NL 8010 Acc. 2014/005, Nr. 225, GPI 1966–1976, Bd. 2, Folder ‘Lehrsysteme 72’.

86 See HHStAW Abt. 504, Nr. 7357b, minutes of the meetings of the scientific advisory board; HHStAW Abt. 504, Nr. 6106, project reports.

87 See UAPB NL 8010 Acc. 2014/005, Nr. 225, GPI 1966–1976, Bd 2, Folder ‘Lehrsysteme 72’.

88 Zabel, ‘Die Lehrmaschinen und der Programmierte Unterricht’, 150–1.

89 Bloomberg Online, Lev Landa’s Worker Miracles , September 21, 1992, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1992-09-20/lev-landas-worker-miracles (accessed November 8, 2016); Furtune Magazine Online, ‘The Russian Who Makes Pros out of Amateurs’, October 12, 1987, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1987/10/12/69663/index.htm?iid=sr-link1 (accessed November 8, 2016).

90 Letter from Klaus Bung to Gordon Pask, February 26, 1972, GPA Vienna, Box 11.3.1; Letter from D. W. Vaags to Gordon Pask, April 13, 1972, GPA Vienna, Box 11.3.1; Letter from M. Refienci to Gordon Pask, May 5, 1972, GPA Vienna, Box 11.3.1.

91 Jon Bird and Ezequiel Di Paolo, ‘Gordon Pask and His Maverick Machines’, in The Mechanical Mind in History , ed. Philip Husbands, Owen Holland and Michael Wheeler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2008) 185–211; Patrick Thornhill, ‘This Programmed Learning 1960–1962’, Innovations in Education & Training International 9, no. 3 (1972): 122–7; Andrew Pickering, Kybernetik und Neue Ontologien (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2007), 121; Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain. Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 325–6.

92 Gerhard Tulodziecki, in discussion with the author, June 11, 2015.

93 Günter Lobin, in discussion with the author, June 10, 2015.

94 Wissenschaftlicher Beirat [scientific advisory board] FEoLL, June 1981, position paper, LAV NRW R NW 615, Nr. 206.

95 Letter from the executive management of FEoLL to the state secretariat of North Rhine-Westphalia, September 20, 1972, LAV NRW R 615, Nr. 452.

96 Letter from the executive management of FEoLL to the state secretariat of Nord Rhine-Westphalia, October 13, 1972, LAV NRW R 615, Nr. 452.

97 FEoLL, November 1974, extension plan, LAV NRW R NW 615, Nr. 354.

98 Edgar Schmidt, December 24, 1971, position paper. HHStAW Abt. 504, Nr. 6671b.

99 Gerhard Ortner, in discussion with the author, June 9, 2015.

100 Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, ‘Deutsche Zeitgeschichte nach 1945: Entwicklung und Problemlagen der historischen Forschung zur Nachkriegszeit’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 41, no. 1 (1993): 1–29.

101 Gerhard Ortner, in discussion with the author, June 9, 2015.

102 Federal minister for labour and social affairs, December 15, 1970, position paper. UAPB Acc. 2014/005 Nr. 228.

103 It would be premature to say that the commercialisation of educational technology played a minor role in the eastern Bloc. In 1973 the fair ‘School Equipment’ was organised in Moscow and the organisers of the ‘Didacta’ (see footnote 107) trade show were invited in order to expand the trading area of Soviet industry by establishing contacts with the western business community (ArWD, Eurodidac letter 1973).

104 Kent E. Myres, ‘What do we Know about Programmed Instruction?’, The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 39, no. 9 (1965): 533; Foltz, Lehrmaschinen , 17; Gandy, ‘Instructional Technology’, 205.

105 Heinz Nixdorf, undated, position paper, LAV NRW R 615, Nr. 452.

106 Letter from the executive management of FEoLL to the state Secretariat of North Rhine-Westphalia, September 20, 1972, LAV NRW R 615, Nr. 452.

107 The fair for teaching equipment, ‘Didacta’, was seen as the ‘most important exhibition event’ in the 1960. In 1968, a ‘Special Exhibition for Programmed Instruction’ was organised (ArWD, 8th Didacta 1966; ArWD, 9th Didacta 1968). ‘Didacta’ had been launched by Eurodidac and since 1983 from Worlddidac (Worlddidac association, what is Worlddidac, 2014 , http://www.worlddidac.org/mc/About-Us.aspx [accessed November 8, 2016]).

108 ArWD, Eurodidac 1970, 255; Frank, Meine Minimemoiren , 107.

109 ArWD, 11th Didacta 1972.

110 Steinert to Abteilungsleiter II, January 4, 1971, memorandum, LAV NRW R 615, Nr. 210.

111 Letter from the executive management of FEoLL to the state secretariat of Nord Rhine-Westphalia, September 20, 1972, LAV NRW R 615, Nr. 452.

112 Günter Lobin, in discussion with the author, June 10, 2015. A similar conflict is a copyright dispute between the education council of Zurich and the publishing house Klett in 1970. Several teachers had taken the initiative to produce material for language labs based on publications by Klett (Bosche and Geiss, ‘Das Sprachlabor’, 132).

113 Wehnert, Paderborner Arbeitspapiere , 72.

114 Eyferth, undated, position paper, HHStAW Abt. 504, Nr. 6108.

115 ArWD, 15th Didacta 1977.

116 Ferster, Teaching Machines , 79.

117 Berg, Heinz Nixdorf , 169–80.

118 Daniel Morrow, oral history interview with Steve Jobs, founder. NeXT Computer , April 20, 1995, http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html (accessed June 2, 2017).

119 Jörg Dräger and Ralph Müller-Eiselt, Die Digitale Bildungsrevolution. Der radikale Wandel des Lernens und wie wir ihn gestalten können (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2015).

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