Enhancing Academic Motivation

I've just ordered Enhancing Academic Motivation from Research Press thanks to a friend of mine whose child is seeing Dr. Brier. Every word out of Dr. Brier's mouth so far has rung true.

When I discovered that Dr. Brier had published with Research Press, I was sold. Research Press published the two books that shepherded Ed and me through our first years with Jimmy: Gerald Patterson's Living with Children and Wesley Becker's Parents Are Teachers. Both are classics.

Wes Becker worked with Engelmann on Project Follow-Through:

During the Project’s third year, we found out that Carl was leaving to go to Canada and become an investigator for the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education and a professor at the University of Toronto. He invited Valerie and me to join him. Valerie accepted; I tentatively declined.

Carl’s impending departure presented serious problems to the preschool project. The reason was that I was not qualified to head the project. The only degree I had was a BA in philosophy, and the position I held then was Senior Educational Specialist, which did not allow me to administer projects. Neither Jean nor Cookie could assume directorship of the project because they also lacked formal credentials.

The rumors were that the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children would take over the project and change it as soon as Carl left. I later found out that Jean and Carl met with Wesley Becker, a gifted professor in the Department of Psychology. Their goal was to seek his help in preserving the project. I had heard a lot about Wes Becker from my sister-in-law, Geraldine Piorkowski, who earned her PhD at the University of Illinois. Wes was her advisor; from her descriptions of him I assumed he could even run on water. Among other achievements, he had set the all-time track record at Stanford for attaining a PhD, entering as a freshman and taking only six years to earn a PhD in clinical psychology and statistics.

At the time he advised Geraldine, Wes was a cognitivist, but shortly after she received her PhD, he became an energetic exponent of Skinner’s behaviorism, which is based on evidence that behavior may be changed by manipulating positive or negative consequences that follow responses. Wes abandoned his earlier orientation because it lacked data of effectiveness, a signature characteristic of Wes. The professional articles that Wes wrote in the '60s show his change in orientation from 1961 to '67: “Measurement of Severity of Disorder in Schizophrenia by Means of the Holtzman Inkblot Test” (1961); “A Circumflex Model for Social Behavior in Children” (1964); “The Parent Attitude Research Instrument” (1965); “How We Encourage Cheating” (1966); and “The Contingent Use of Teacher Attention and Praise in Reducing Classroom Behavior Problems” (1967).

I had met Becker only once. He had presented to our project staff and graduate students. He summarized his current research, which involved working with teachers in failed classrooms and teaching them techniques for using positive reinforcement with their students. His data showed that even though most teachers had to be instructed in how to give praise, and even though the praise some of them issued sounded contrived and unnatural, it changed students’ behavior. The basic thrust of Wes’s training was, “Catch kids in the act of being good.” His studies were among the first applications of Skinner’s version of behaviorism to humans and school settings.

After the meeting I told him about some of the observations we had made in the preschools. He listened, then asked, “Where’s the data?”

I told him I didn’t have any formal data related to the observations. He smiled and shrugged. The message this gesture conveyed was that if I wanted to demonstrate the validity of my assertions, I needed data.

Jean and Carl had set up their meeting to ask Wes if he would assume the role of director of our project. They didn’t have a chance to ask him, however. As they entered his office, he greeted them, and said, “I know why you’re here, and the answer is yes.”

I count this as one of the more amazing commitments a person could make. The project was embroiled in controversy. The work was demanding. By saying “yes,” Wes made an official break with the fortress of higher learning and moved to the trenches, the gritty realities of working with teachers and kids.

Wes brought some of his graduate and undergraduate students with him. Thirty years later, I still work with three of them: Doug Carnine, a shy undergraduate who had already authored articles that appeared in professional journals; Linda McRoberts, an adventurous and outspoken graduate student who later would become Linda Carnine; and Susan Stearns (now Susan Hanner), only nineteen years old but very smart and industrious.

[snip]

Wes devoted some of his “free time” to writing the book, Applied Psychology for Teachers, a very ambitious work that covered everything related to effective practices and background information—from behavioral principles to the theoretical underpinnings of effective instruction and how to interpret data on student performance. I believe that Wes considered this book his ultimate achievement, an opus that positioned effective teaching and the analysis of learning in a framework that could be comprehended by undergraduates and that would establish DI as at least a contender in the field of education. The work, positioned as a textbook for undergraduates, was published by SRA in 1986. It was a colossal work—472 pages, in 8 1/2” x 11” format, with 275 references (over 11 pages).

It was another false hope. The book did not sell, was not adopted by more
than a handful of the faithful, and after only a few years, was discontinued by SRA. No other publisher was interested in it. I recently bought a copy of it online. It was in very good condition and cost $4.50.

[snip]

Goodbye to a Good Guy

Wes and Julie were divorced in1980. Wes continued in his role as associate
dean until 1992, when he became involved in political wars with the College of Education and quit the University. After retiring, he refused to talk about education. On three or four occasions, I tried to discuss the book we had started. I got the same response each time. He said that he would talk about golf or other sports and the stock market, but that was all. He declined to talk about the Association for Direct Instruction, or about anything else related to education. He told me, “That is something from a past life. It’s dead and I have no interest in it.”

In 1993, Wes sold his shares in Engelmann-Becker Corp. and moved from
Eugene to Sedona, Arizona. There was no going-away party or celebration
because he didn’t want one. Just before he left, I asked if there was anything I could do for him. He asked if I would give him a painting I had done of a lion. Yes.

I called him several times in Arizona to see how things were going. Not well. I called him once around noon and he sounded as if he’d been drinking. His leg had gone bad so he couldn’t play golf, and the stock market had not been kind to him. His son David lived with him for a while but left. Wes never remarried and lived alone. A couple of times I asked him when he was coming back to visit us in Eugene. He seemed to entertain the idea but it apparently didn’t make the seriousplanning list. I never saw Wes again after he moved to Arizona.

[snip]

Wes’ death came as a great shock. I hadn’t been in touch with him for months.
I knew he was getting frequent tests, but I had no idea that he would die at 73. We felt we should do something to honor him and decided to hold a memorial service for him in Eugene. We put a notice in the paper, made many calls, and arranged to hold the service in the church that Wes had attended (the Unitarian Church). A lot of people showed up for the service, including Don Bushell, Wes’ daughter Jill (who is a professor of biopsychology at the University of Michigan), his son David, and his ex wife, Julie (who lived in Florida). We took turns telling Wes stories and feeling sad.

I said, “Those who worked with him were routinely amazed, not only by his
skill, but the speed with which he could do things. Perhaps his most impressive quality, however, was the strength of his will. In the face of terrible setbacks and impossible deadlines, Wes prevailed. If he promised to get something done by a particular time, it was not only done on schedule, but done very well.”

Several others echoed this observation. One researcher who studied under
Wes said something that I had observed many times, the amazing speed at which Wes could identify glitches in raw data or elaborate calculations. About the time I was looking at the first few numbers on a spreadsheet of data, Wes would point to a set of scores in the middle of the display and say something like, “It’s impossible for them to have a correlation of point 9 with these data. These scores account for no more than 5 percent of the variance.” Possibly a minute later, I would see what he meant, but if I’d figured it out on my own, it would probably have taken closer to an hour.

I pointed out that even with the incredible number of things he had to do,
Wes was a good dad (a lot better than I was during the Follow Through years). Wes’ daughter Jill expanded on this theme. She told about some of the nice things he had done and indicated that the only time he lied to her was a couple of months before he died. She had visited him in a hospital in California. The last thing she said before leaving was, “Now, you take care of yourself. I’ll be back in three months.”

He said, “I’ll be fine.”

The clinical causes of Wes’ death had to do with his liver, kidneys and blood
pressure. One of the contributing causes was that he probably drank too much. These may have been the measurable causes, but the psychological cause was that he killed himself. When the establishment rejected Wes and his beliefs in data, he rejected education. To do that, he had to reject a huge part of himself. The image of himself that he had to maintain afterwards was one with many amputated parts, the hollow core that could survive on what had been peripheral interests. When his physical health failed, he had nothing.

The sad part of this equation was that Wes had to reject himself not because
he did anything reprehensible but because the establishment made a mockery of his beliefs and accomplishments. Jill believes that someday he will be recognized for his singular contribution to Follow Through. I hope she’s right, but I can sympathize with Wes. It is not very comforting to know that you can help thousands of kids and teachers, but you lack credibility and have no access to these victims. It hurts to see your professional beliefs trampled by educators who cling desperately to myth and folklore.

A colleague recently showed me a picture from the ‘70s, taken at a “Zignic” (a
picnic at the Veneta property for all our trainers and friends). Six people, including Wes, Bob, and I, were wearing t-shirts with the motto, “Show me the data.” For Wes, it was a way of life.

How is Wes remembered? In 2003, the College of Education at the University of Oregon launched a fund-raising campaign to support construction of a mega-building to house the College. Part of what the planners did was to make up a price list for “dedications.” If you want an office named after somebody, donate $25,000, and the plaque goes up. For a decent-sized classroom, the ticket is about $100,000.

Shortly after the list came out, Doug called me about raising enough money to have a classroom named after Wes. I told him that we shouldn’t have to pay anything. My feeling was that the College should have dedicated an entire wing to Wes, with no donation required. The College didn’t see it that way. Doug is currently trying to negotiate the price of a plaque for both Wes and Bob at the entrance to the Clinical Services Building, which was one of Bob’s projects.

Siegfried Engelmann 2007

Parents Are Teachers table of contents
Living with Children table of contents