A Study of Children's Perceptions of Intrinsic Teaching Machines and Programmed Instruction

The semantic differential technique was used to evaluate what children thought about teaching machines and the program used in them. It was found that children thought of teaching machines in terms of evaluation, potency, activity, novelty and speed. Children thought that the program was more demanding and forceful than the machine, although the machine was thought of as a novel device. Girls considered that programmed instruction was more useful than did boys, and children in a less well organised school thought the machine to be more useful than did children in a well organised school.