Precision teaching is a method of planning individualized instruction to meet students' needs. It involves setting specific, measurable learning targets and regularly assessing student progress towards those targets through short practice probes. Student performance is charted daily to monitor effectiveness and inform changes to teaching methods. Precision teaching draws on theories of learning hierarchies and the zone of proximal development to focus instruction within a student's capabilities and ensure new skills become fluent before moving on. It has been shown to help students who struggle with accuracy, fluency, self-efficacy or generalization of skills.

1. Precision
Teaching
Jammu University
2 Year B.Ed.
Paper 202/3
Sem: II
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2. One of the most effective teaching strategies
for ensuring high levels of fluency and
accuracy is Precision Teaching.
Precision Teaching provides regular practise
on very specific teaching targets using
‘probes’ to practise and monitor progress
towards the target.
Precision teaching uses short practise tasks
that teacher completes regularly with the
pupil.

3. Probes have been used for many years to
learn in many different skill areas and can
take many forms from lists of words to pages
of sums.
Probes monitor or probe the extent to which
the pupil is accurate and fluent in that skill
area.

4. Precision Teaching is a method of planning a
teaching program to meet the needs of an
individual child or young person who is
experiencing difficulty with acquiring or
maintaining some skills.
It has an inbuilt monitoring function and is
basically a means of evaluating the effectiveness
of what is being taught.
It can be used in early years, primary and
secondary settings and can be applied to areas of
the curriculum that can be broken down into
clear objectives, e.g.: numeracy and literacy
skills.

5. Theory behind Precision Teaching
Vygotsky suggested that effective teaching
should be geared towards a learner’s ‘zone of
proximal development’ (ZPD). Precision
teaching encourages us to be very specific
about the material used with the child,
ensuring that it is within the ZPD.
Precision teaching also draws on learning
hierarchy which shows us how new learning
needs to be fluent before it can be maintained
effectively

6. Which children might benefit from
precision teaching?
Children who seem able enough to complete
tasks but are reluctant to try (self -efficacy)
Children who appear to know something one
day but not the next (stuck on accuracy –
need fluency)
Children who appear to know something in
one area but not in another (stuck on
maintenance –need to generalize)
Children who are very slow in the production
of work (stuck on accuracy- need fluency)

7. What do I do?
Spend 5 to 10 minutes teaching the child/young
person the 2 new items using whichever teaching
method you think is best.
Using the probe, ask the child/young person to
see how many they can get right in 1 minute.
This should be a fun activity.
Make note of the number of correct items and
number of errors
A note of the errors is made so you can target
these for your next round of teaching – keeping
the teaching ‘precise’
Record the correct responses and errors on the
PRECISION TEACHING CHART

8. The five basic components of precision
teaching
1. Specifying desired pupil performance in
observable, measurable terms:
Having decided on the area that teacher wish the
child to start on, a precise target must be set
which is both observable and measurable.
2. Recording the performance on a daily
basis:
This is done using the probes and their
accompanying record sheets.
The child should work on the probe for a short
time at least once a day (ideally three times a
day), usually for a minute.

9. 3. Charting performance on a daily basis:
 The teacher records the pupil’s correct and incorrect
rate every time the probe is used, and can then plot
this data on a fluency chart.
 The fluency chart has a ratio scale that shows the
relative increase or decrease in a child’s performance.
4. Recording teacher behaviour or teaching approach
in relation to pupil performance:
 This refers to the planned, systematic changes, which
the teacher might make.
 For example changes may be made in the use of
praise, or in the nature of the teaching program.
 Task analysis or task slicing may be used.

10. 5. Analysis of the data to determine:
(i) Whether progress is satisfactory;
(ii) Whether changes are needed in teaching
approach in order to maintain or accelerate
progress

11. Origin of Precision Teaching
 Founder of Precision Teaching- O. R. Lindsley
 During the 1960s, many of the students and colleagues
of B. F. Skinner moved from basic research
laboratories into applied settings.
 Most of those who began to apply what had been
learned in the laboratory to educational problems
created processes and programs based on the findings
of basic research.
 Using reinforcement schedules, behavior shaping,
discrimination learning paradigms, stimulus fading,
and other principles and procedures derived from
laboratory research, these pioneers created teaching
programs and revised them based on measured effects.

12.  When they moved into the classroom, most
behaviorists discarded the measurement framework
that had proven so useful in basic research laboratories
(rate or frequency of response) in favor of the scale
used in virtually all traditional educational
evaluation—percentage.
 Despite Skinner’s conclusion that “rate of responding
appears to be the only data which varies significantly
and in the expected direction under conditions which
are relevant to the learning process,”
 Most behaviorally oriented instructional technologists
opted to measure accuracy only

13. Instead of creating programs and “recipes”
based on laboratory findings, he emphasized
the measurement framework that had proven
so powerful for Skinner and his associates in
the laboratory.
He created the “Standard Behavior Chart”
(Standard Celeration Chart), a graph for
charting behavior frequency (or rate) against
calendar days

14.  The Standard Behavior Chart proved to be an
important contribution to the study of learning and
performance.
 Its logarithmic or “multiply-divide” count per minute
scale along the left axis enabled students and teachers
to chart and directly assess ratios of correct and error
frequencies, and to view and quantify progress in the
form of straight-line trends rather than “learning
curves” formed by sequences of daily frequency
measures on the chart.
 By using daily charts, teachers and students were able
to make timely decisions about the effectiveness of
methods and materials in helping students to achieve
defined performance goals.

15. Precision Teaching Philosophy and
Strategies
A key element of Precision Teaching is the
maxim that “the child knows best”.
Based on Skinner’s famous statement that “the
organism is always right,” Lindsley taught
Precision Teachers to assume that learners
respond in lawful ways to environmental
variables and that if learners behave in an
undesirable way it is the responsibility of
teachers to alter those variables until they
produce the desired result.
Daily measurement of performance was another
important element of Precision Teaching from
the beginning.

16. Current Efforts and Future
Trends
Precision Teaching as a “movement” is still quite
small in the context of mainstream education.
One factor that may have prevented widespread
adoption is that it has been developed primarily
by practitioners, not by academics.
Consequently, there have been relatively few
publications about Precision Teaching because
teachers, unlike academics, have neither the
interest nor tangible incentives for publication.

17. The result, after a quarter of a century, is a
relatively mature and extremely potent set of
discoveries and practices that are not widely
acknowledged or accepted in the academic
community.
A number of commercially available
computer based programs for instruction, for
authoring and delivering instruction, and for
charting and decision-making have been
based on Precision Teaching principles and
procedures.