1.5 EARLY AUDIO VISUAL SCHOLARSHIP

1.5.1 Connectionism and Mental Measurement

Scholarly audiovisual texts written in the early 30s display a convergence of the compatible discourses of social efficiency and Thorndike's brand of psychology and mental measurement. This convergence, which can be traced in educational psychology as well as educational technology, remains with us today. Of concern to AV scholars in the 30s was the effectiveness of film in teaching school subjects, the proper application of films in the classroom, and the intellectual and emotional impact of commercial films on students.

15.1.1. University Press. One way of ascertaining the status of a new area of study in the academy is to note if university presses, which print primarily scholarly material, publish books on the new area. Three books published by prestigious university presses in the early 30s were The Educational Talking Picture (Devereux, 1933), The Sound Motion Picture (Rulon, 1933), and Motion Pictures in Education in the United States (Koon, 1934). These books begin to disclose what the founders of educational technology thought was knowledge important enough to be included in the field. The Devereux text (in the foreword, Robert Hutchins provides the text with an additional note of authority and a military connection when he refers to the author as "Colonel Devereux") and the Rulon textbook include reports of experiments with students and films. The language of the laboratory is employed, and strenuous efforts at objectivity are made. A list of the illustrations in the Devereux book and a list of the tables in the Rulon text will provide a picture of the depth of commitment to connectionism and mental measurements, even in the early 30s (see Fig. 1-1).

These lists indicate that the authors were following the lead of the few AV researchers who had preceded them in the 1920s. They were using experimental and control groups, and were controlling for some individual differences (students were not yet called subjects). They were measuring mean differences and were using standard IQ measures. In the light of today's more sophisticated statistics, the experiments were lacking. They did, for instance, measure the percent of mean difference and conclude that a film was X% better in teaching a subject than was standard teaching. But the base of a behavioral discourse complemented by specific mental measurements was there in its entirety. What was thought to be important were elements that could be isolated and controlled and, therefore, measured, i.e., intelligence and performance on immediate and delayed tests. Edgar Dale comments on the fact that the experimental model was de riguer even in the 20s.

They employed Freeman, Frank Freeman of the University of Chicago and Ben Woods of Columbia University to make a study of audiovisual materials, films in this case. So they set up an experiment in the usual fashion (italics ours). They had control groups and experimental groups. They produced 20 films, 10 in general science and 10 in . . . general science and geography.... And plans were very care fully developed for the use of those materials.... Well, then they gave pretests and posttests. And speaking roughly, the youngsters having the films learned 15% more information than the ones that did not have it. Although it was a curious thing that happened. They let them (the schools) chose their own control groups. It turned out that the schools made the control groups typically brighter than the others. And this curious kind of reasoning (emerged), namely, because the control groups would not have the advantage of the film, so they ought to be just a little bit brighter and so on. Of course it's suspicious reasoning. That's what we're trying to test.... But they (the experimental groups) did better. And these (tests) would be simple information of what was in the film (Dale, 1977).

Early and late, the human factor confounded laboratory practices.

Figure 1-1. List of Illustrations, results of experimentation from The Educational Talking Picture, by F. Devereux, 1933, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, xiii.

Figure 1-2. List of Tables, from The Sound Motion Picture, by J. Rulon,1933, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, xiii.

1.5.2 A Small Circle of Friends

Another way to discover the theoretical underpinnings of researchers is to note the resources included in their texts. In his bibliography, Rulon leans heavily on the audiovisual experiments of Freeman (1922, 1924) in the 20s, the behaviorism of Hull (1928), the experimental work of Knowleton and Ellton (1929), and McClusky (1924). (See Fig. 1-2.)

Other scholars often cited were J. J. Weber (who spanned the 20s and 30s), H. Wise (1939), L. Westfall (1937), V. Arnspiger (1937), and F. Consitt (Dale, p. 400). Weber's work compared silent film, slides, and diagrams as modes of instruction, while Westfall examined pupil interest and IQ in relation to film. Arnspiger, who later became director of educational research for Educational Research Pictures Incorporated (ERPI), explored retention of information after film screening and the type of information best suited to film, while Consitt wrote about grade-level differences for film learning and subject matter suited to film. Wise experimented with film for the teaching of history. Their research followed the lead of AV studies of the 20s and was built on a behavioral or connectionist base while employing mental measurements. The subject matter and rhetoric of their reports generally follow the topics and style of the texts reported above.

Like interlocking boards of directors, the names of a small group of AV experimental researchers from the late teens and 20s appear extensively in the literature of the 30s and even the 40s. They are Sumstine (1918), Lacy (1919), Weber (1922) and his pioneer study with 500 New York seventh-graders, Freeman (1924) and his large study at the University of Chicago, Knowlton and Tilton (1929) at Yale and their work with the Yale Chronicles of America, Freeman's joint project with Ben Wood at Columbia University (Wood & Freeman, 1929), and McClusky (1924) who became director of the Department of Visual Instruction of the National Education Association.

Media in the 20s and 30s classroom was certainly not restricted to sound films, however. James Brown tells us:

Well (we used) the famous Keystone 600 set for example in the social studies, which was a set of 600 3 1/4-by4- inch black-and-white slides done by the Keystone Company in Meadville, Pennsylvania. [it] was one of the tools that we used. We had mostly silent films when I started, 16-mm silent films, that seems a long time ago.... They usually had captions in those days. Following the precepts of how you teach with a silent film-and I still think silent films have a great deal to offer in this regard-we would generally stop and start the film throughout; and stop and discuss or put it on hold for a still picture on the screen, even though it was a motion picture.... So you could do that and teach from the pictures (Brown, n.d.).

1.5.3 Film Usage in the 1930s

Research reports were not the only topics of scholarly audiovisual texts of the 1930s. Two (Koon & Devereux) of the three scholarly AV books (Koon, Devereux & Rulon) published by University Presses in the early 30s and cited above include discussions of subjects other than experiments. To introduce these topics, we include selections from their tables of contents.

1.5.4 Programs for Administration

The administration of audiovisual aids in schools and the utilization of these aids in classrooms was an important, almost dominant, aspect of general and some scholarly AV texts in the 30s. Whereas today, a university press or academic journal, such as Educational Technology Research and Development, would be reluctant to publish "how to" articles about technology, such was not the case in the early 30s. While all the scholarly texts we examined from that time did base their recommendations for film usage on experimentation, they also provided school-, district-, and statewide guidelines for administering AV programs; tips for screening films in the classroom; criteria for selection of films; and sometimes directions for local production of films. These topics were a vital aspect of a burgeoning field, since most educators had little or no knowledge of the application of films in the classroom. Because no rhetoric is neutral, language of administration and utilization of AV materials needs to be examined briefly.

Devereux elevates the pragmatic tasks of utilization and production by including them in a research agenda for the field in a chart (see Fig. 1-3).

Although Devereux's chart for film research appeared in 1933, it is similar to many later instructional development charts for either programmatic research in the field of design and development of curricular or training materials. A couple of decades later, systems theory appears in the educational technology literature. Springing from the human engineering field and the military, systems literature is replete with charts that partition and categorize concepts and tasks. Devereux had been a colonel in the Army and an executive for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company for many years (Saettler, 1990). When his book was published, he was vice president of Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI), a nontheatrical film production company that was a subsidiary of AT&T. Clearly, he had knowledge of administrative practices in the military and corporate sectors. This crossbreeding is not trivial when one attempts to understand the emergence of this technological field, and we will return to this point later. Briefly, we find no other educational field, or many early academic fields, so tied to machines and technology and, therefore, market economics.

Figure 1-3. Tables of contents from The Educational Talking Picture, by F. Devereux, 1933, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ix.

Figure 1-4. Table of contents from Motion Pictures in Education in the United States, by C. Koon, 1934, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, xiv.

Figure 1-5. Major research functions in developing the educational talking-picture program, Deuereux, 1933, p. 4..

1.5.5 Administration and Social Efficiency

When addressing administration of audiovisual programs, the authors of these texts (Koon & Devereux) invoke the vernacular of the social efficiency movement. In the first five pages of his text, Devereux (1934) uses some form of effective six times: "to increase the effectiveness of the process" (p. 1), "any effective use of the talking picture" (p. 2), "effective educational talking pictures," and "the working effectiveness of various elements of film" (p. 3), "depends upon effective utilization" (p. 5).

In a chapter entitled The Systematic Introduction of Motion Pictures in Teaching, Koon (1933) uses the following language ". . . a real need for improved methods of instruction, particularly the use of media which will furnish meaningful content to the school curriculum" (p. 57). Experiments, he claims, have shown that media "increases initial learning, effects an economy of time in learning, increases permanence of learning, aids in teaching backward children and motivates learning" (p.57) [Italics ours.] (It should be noted that many authors writing in the 20s and 30s considered backward children to be a prime audience for audiovisual aids.) Koon was the senior specialist in radio and visual education, U.S. Department of the Interior, and was another researcher naturally concerned with the administrative aspects of these programs. Speaking with the authority of the federal government and as a representatives of corporate America, Koon and Devereux were invited to publish scholarship at university presses, although each author had collaborators who were university faculty. That their voices reflect the popular social efficiency movement of the day is not unusual. One of the Iynchpins, however, of social efficiency is social control, and this effect surfaces obviously in Koon, and again in a more latent fashion in Devereux and Rulon when they use IQ and other tests to "isolate and control" differences.

Koon's (1933) subheadings in a chapter on problems with introduction of film in teaching are shown in Figure 1-6.

What is of interest here is another aspect of the language of social efficiency. Federal aid to education had not yet started in the 30s, but interest in some level of systematic governmental intervention was an issue for Koon.

1.5.6 Authors' Interests

Part of discourse analysis is the examination of author intention, and prefaces and forwards provide clues to reasons why writers have produced texts, disclose the authority with which they speak, and the manner in which they position their readers. Prefaces and forewords in Rulon (1933, pp. iix-xi), Devereux (1933, pp. v-vii) and Koon (1934, pp. v-xi) texts are rich sites for such examination. Some of the introductory comments of these books are written in a different style. The language of one (Rulon, 1933) remains terse, unelaborated, and scientific in style, but the other two display a different voice, one not heard in the body of the texts. The Koon (1934) foreword is somewhat literary, containing figures of speech such as "Let who will make my country's laws, so long as I may write her songs . . . " (p. v), and ". . . that is entertained and informed by this magical master teacher . . ." (p. v), ". . . but these are kaleidoscope times" (p.vi), and "As we approach the dawn of a new day in industrial life . . ." (p. vi). It is a rhetoric that runs counter to the unelaborated "scientific" language that academic researchers strove for then and now, but its voice breaks through the opening statements of these early texts and others in the 30s and 40s, despite the authors' attempts to control this voice, to be objective. However, the voice of objectivity, terse and scientific, efficient in its style, appears in these opening segments and is coexistent with an elaborated voice. In other AV texts of the 30s that are expositions or summaries and published by presses other than university presses, this conflated voice runs rampant in the discourses and uncovers some of the motives of the founders of the field. (As 1990s scholars in the field, we find it refreshing to hear this voice.

Figure 1-6. Chapter subheadings from Motion Pictures in Education in the United States, by C. Koon,1934, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, xiv.

1.5.6.1. Conflated Voice. Our thesis about the appearance of this conflated voice is that many discourses were conjoined in the turbulent 30s. Even though the early AV authors were highly influenced by the social efficiency movement in the schools and behavioral methods of research, they had been trained to write in public schools in the teens and 20s. Composition instruction, at that time, relied heavily on literary techniques. Whether students were writing narratives or expositions, they were taught to describe their plots or advance their arguments by employing figures of speech and by alluding to classical writings. Thirties AV writers had learned their expository rhetoric well, and their texts seek primarily to convince an audience of a point of view. They state their argument, provide proof, and summarize their points.

1.5.6.2. Technology as Progress. Methods of proof, however, do disclose a primary allegiance to social efficiency and behaviorism and adopt the language of those discourses. Nonetheless, persuasive techniques in an elaborated language seek to convince the reader of the goodness of technology for society and more specifically of the value of films in public classrooms. Indeed, the authors often become rhapsodic about this value.

Louis Forsdale's comment is typical of this stance:

. . . one other thing that we also believed to be true was that if the moving image was indeed accessible to everybody- child, teacher, housewife, anybody-that it would then come closer to the role that the book has played (Forsdale, 1979).

1f there is an underlying assumption that coalesces these early voices it is that technology is progress; technology is an ameliorative force in society. If some of the founders had private fears about the proliferation of technology, it rarely entered their public discourse. Within our texts, we found only one note of caution:

We must be careful to avoid . . . one of the gravest dangers of the audiovisual field: the notion that the mere bringing of people physically and sensorially into contact with objects and materials always offers a communication of experience (Dale, 1977).

Floyde Brooker (1975) mentioned public concern, not about the cognitive nor moral effects of the films but about health:

One of the great fears of the public at that time was that the children seeing motion pictures in a dark room would injure their eyes.... Eastman Kodak ... they had tinted all their films a deep amber color, in order to prevent injury to the eyes. And all the people on the panels that were seeing the Teaching Film Custodian films had their eyes examined by a battery of ophthalmologists every week to make sure that their eyes were not being damaged by seeing so many motion pictures. And this was used throughout the educational journals of the time to give proof to the fact that seeing motion pictures was not injurious to the eyes of children (Brooker,1975).

Although they were concerned with the appropriate projection of films in the classroom, and proper AV administration in schools and districts, those issues were primarily mechanistic. Founders' concerns about the criteria for selection of films mainly addressed the learning gains to be obtained from the screening of any one film. Where some of these authors did express concern about the proliferation of films and the effect on children, it was in relationship to students' exposure to Hollywood film. A modicum of that concern spilled over into the classroom; for example, see Motion Pictures in Education: A Summary of the Literature: Source Book for Teachers and Administrators, by Edgar Dale, Fannie W. Dunn, Charles F. Hoban, and Etta Schneider (1937). It is not unusual in the history of technology for discrete discourses about the social effects of mechanization to develop from the love-hate positions that people assume vis-à-vis machines (Benjamin, 1968; Nichols, 1981), but the cautious position is not present in the written or oral texts we examined. A general enthusiasm for technology in the classroom permeated the public texts. It was one spoken value that partially unified the audiovisual project and probably accounts, in large measure, for the success in establishing the field.