Carl Binder

The Performance Thinking Network

With an end goal to build and maintain a new workplace culture to support workplace performance, the central human resources shared services group for a large university initiated a pilot project to improve the performance of their processes, systems, and its human resources. Through the guidance of a performance improvement professional facilitato...

Human performance technology (HPT) evolved with the shift from a focus on behavior to accomplishments, the valuable products of behavior. The term accomplishment has not always been used consistently over the years, to the detriment of the field. This article summarizes benefits of accomplishment-based performance improvement, reviews Joe Harless's...

Traditional approaches to the study of distraction have involved evaluations of the effect of a stimulus on specific task performance, but without a conceptual analysis of how the stimulus might actually interfere with the specific task. In the present study, we evaluated the potentially distracting effects of various classes of stimuli that were r...

Early analyses of organizational culture used and an approach derived from cultural anthropology to provide guidance for leaders, managers, and employees, but lacked units of analysis congruent with behavior science. More recent approaches identify values and practices, the latter being behavior which can be analyzed. However, the abstract language...

Evidence-based teaching in real time for process improvement and engaged learners

A team of performance consultants at Amerigroup applied their chosen human performance technology (HPT) methodology, Six Boxes® Performance Thinking, to define their own performance, identify improvement opportunities, and build performance infrastructure in the form of clearer expectations and regular feedback, better processes and tools, and more...

Note: This commentary is part of an ongoing dialogue that began in the October 2011 Performance Improvement special issue entitled Exploring a Universal Performance Model for HPT: Notes From the Field.

In the field of human performance technology (HPT), the understanding of performance management provides a rationale for measurement and evaluation. This chapter takes a somewhat different approach to the discussion of performance measurement and evaluation. The principles and concepts reflect the author’s background and perspective and are as much...

A Divergent Perspective Terminology A Natural Science Foundation Measurement and the Performance Chain Behavior Influences: the Independent Variables Standard Data Display for Decision Making Summary and Conclusion References

Precision teaching emerged from O.R. Lindsley’s pristine application of Skinner’s natural science of behavior, with a focus on response rate measurement and free operant procedures. When applied with human learners in instructional settings, these first principles led to a series of developments framed in this paper as four kinds of ceilings that c...

Hypertext is a computer technology for “nonsequential reading and writing” in which chunks or nodes of information are connected by fixed links. Users access hypertext by selecting cross-reference (or “buttons”) in the context of a given node that is connected via links to other nodes. Such an “associative” strategy for information storage and retr...

Obituary for Ogden R. Lindsley Jr. (1922-2004). On October 10, 2004, we lost a giant in the field of behavior analysis. The full impact of his contributions to both basic and applied science will undoubtedly unfold in the coming years. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

A functional assessment procedure, which was designed to identify insufficient skills that may have been responsible for employee performance problems, was administered to four foremen employed in a large construction organization. Results of this assessment procedure identified two skill areas, product knowledge and data entry, as deficient. Based...

This chapter presents some of the innovations of Precision Teaching (PT) in more detail. It also describes the applications of PT for special education, college classrooms, prevocational training, accommodation to disability, personal growth, and other topics. The fast and convenient measurement, decision making, and communication of PT help teache...

Presents the obituary for Beatrice H. Barrett (1929-2003). Dr. Barrett trained residents in psychiatry and pediatrics while conducting research at the Institute for Psychiatric Research at Indiana University and maintained a private practice. Her first published operant conditioning study demonstrated reduction in clinical symptoms using laboratory...

Dr. Carl Binder is a Partner in Binder Riha Associates, a performance consulting firm in Santa Rosa, California. He is best known for research in behavioral fluency and development of the Fluency Building™ performance improvement methodology, and for contributions in knowledge management for sales and marketing organizations, performance measuremen...

by measuring; 2. a refer-ence standard or sample used for the quan-titative comparison of properties. (The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition). Lindsley (1999) and others have observed how few International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) publica-tions or presentations contain measures of performance or business results...

Carl Binder, Ph.D., one of B.F. Skinner's last students at Harvard, was Associate Director of a university-affiliated research center during the 1970s. He started his first consulting firm in 1982, Precision Teaching and Management Systems, Inc., where he commercialized his research as the Fluency Building instructional and assessment methodology....

Behavioral fluency is that combination of accuracy plus speed of responding that enables competent individuals to function efficiently and effectively in their natural environments. Evolving from the methodology of free-operant conditioning, the practice of precision teaching set the stage for discoveries about relations between behavior frequency...

The core innovations represented by the field of Human Performance Technology (HPT) trace their origins, by way of Programmed Instruction, to the field of Behavior Analysis, a natural science methodology for the study of behavior developed by B.F. Skinner. This methodology, like all experimental natural science, rests on a foundation of functional...

The failure to gain wider acceptance of measurably effective teaching methods by the educational establishment may be due to resistance to behaviorism, in particular, and to a set of contingencies that resist change, in general. The promotion of effective instructional methods is presented in terms of recommended marketing principles, including ide...

The Morningside Academy in Seattle, Washington, is a remedial program for children and youth with learning problems. Working with job preparation agencies and focusing on fluency-building techniques with real-world applications, the program improves basic skills an average of two grade levels every five weeks. (SK)

Although educators, policy-makers, business leaders, and the general public have become increasingly concerned about the “basic skills” crisis in American schools, research-based solutions have existed for over two decades in the form of measurably superior teaching methodologies: Precision Teaching and Direct Instruction. In federally validated re...