The paper describes the development, in Brazil, of a line of investigation directed towards the planning, implementation and assessment of effective teaching conditions directed to the improvement of higher education. Carolina Bori played a central role in this process throughout her career as university professor, students supervisor, educational agencies advisor, publishing houses consultant, university administration, as well as scientific societies founding and leading. Her ideas and initiatives gave rise to and supported the main advances in Programmed Learning, since the origins of the so called Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) in the early sixties. These advances include 1) the main role attributed to the proposition of relevant goals as the first and necessary step in the programming of teaching conditions; 2) the stress on the need of empirical research to support the proposition of these goals, so that they will point to new directions in teaching (directions beyond those which routinely guide traditional teaching practices); 3) the permanent effort to find out new alternatives to arrange effective teaching conditions; 4) the emphasis on the concept of activity as a special condition to promote the learner’s acquisition of skills, knowledge, concepts, methods etc. In support of these propositions, the paper reviews and analyses important theoretical contributions derived from studies conducted in Brazil on Programmed Learning.
Teaching; Programed instruction; Personalized system of instruction; Behavior analysis