Susan Meyer Markle: Doyenne of Instructional Design

Mirari Elcoro
Department of Psychology and Philosophy
Framingham State University, Framingham, MA
Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies Advisor

Susan Meyer Markle (1928–2008) wasn’t just the only woman working alongside B.F. Skinner in Harvard’s Teaching Machines Project, she was a visionary. Her contributions to instructional design stretched far beyond those early days between 1956 and 1960 at Harvard University. Below I highlighted just a small part of her impressive journey, which truly merits greater recognition and study.

Photo of Susan Meyer Markle with B. F. Skinner. Source unknown. Courtesy of T. V. Joe Layng.

The field of instructional design, previously known as programmed instruction, consists of effectively and empirically designing individualized instruction, initially delivered using teaching machines. Markle likened programmed instruction to the work of a tutor who challenges and adapts learning opportunities for a student (Watters, 2021). The student advances through the instructional materials at their own pace, contacts reinforcement according to their performance until mastery is attained. To be clear, the program of instruction was crucial for teaching, not the machine.

“One of the stars of Skinner’s teaching machine project was a postdoctoral researcher named Susan Meyer Markle. Half a decade later, when she wrote her most popular work, Good Frames and Bad, she established herself as one of the major forces of the instructional-technology movement. She remained in the forefront until she retired from university research and teaching 30 years later” (Zemke & Armstrong, 1997).

“Skinner may have introduced the concept of programmed instruction to the public, but it was educational practitioners and instructional designers like Markle who carried the concept into popular usage and developed the conventions by which programmed instruction is applied” (Day, 2016, p. 42).

Markle attended Smith College (Northampton, MA) for undergraduate studies in math, history, music, art, and literature (Narahara & Haney, 2000). After, she was the first woman admitted to the graduate program in experimental psychology at the University of Buffalo (NY) working under Donald Bullock (Markle, 1979; Narahara & Haney, 2000). While being a graduate student and ABD, between 1956 and 1960, she worked with B. F. Skinner in the Teaching Machines Project at Harvard University, first as research associate and then as a fellow (Markle, 1979; Watters, 2021)

In the Teaching Machines Project (also known as the Programmed Instruction Project), Markle worked alongside James Holland, Lloyd Homme, Douglas Porter, Welles Hively, and others (Gollub, 2002). In a letter to Skinner, Markle (1979) pointed out that her dissertation was the first on programmed instruction, correcting another project member’s claim to that distinction. Markle (1964a) also documented some of the history of the Teaching Machines Project at Harvard as evidenced in “Teaching Machines and Programmed Instruction. The Harvard Teaching Machine Project First Hundred Days.” In the first paragraph, Markle recounts how as the only woman in the group, she was given the role of secretary to take notes during the meetings of the Teaching Machines Project; “(…) a secretary who was selected, not because of expertise in the subjects under discussion, but in keeping with standardized conceptions of what a secretary should look like” (Markle, 1964, p. 344; Skinner, 1983, p. 137).

In the context of sexism at Harvard, and more broadly, Markle’s important contributions to programmed instruction were often professionally undermined, with men typically receiving the credit instead (Watters, 2021; Ultican, 2021). On top of that, Markle went through several name changes due to marriage, as was expected at the time. These changes made her work harder to track, even though she remained a prolific researcher. In the literature, she was also referred to as Susan Meyer. Actually Skinner (1957/2014) referred to her as Mrs. Meyer when crediting her for editing his book Verbal Behavior.

After working at Harvard, Markle moved to New York to develop national instruction standards at The Center for Programmed Instruction, a non-profit organization with Ken Komoski and Lew Eigen (Markle, 1979; Narahara & Haney, 2000). In 1962 she became an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she worked with Art Lumsdaine, co-editor of Teaching Machines and Programmed Instruction, and published Good Frames and Bad: A Grammar of Frame Writing (Markle, 1964b), the first detailed collection of programmed instruction (Layng, 2024).

From 1965 until 1993 Markle served as professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and there she also was the Director of Instructional Resources. Markle was the fifth (and first woman) president of National Society for Programmed Instruction, known today as the International Society for Performance Improvement (Narahara & Haney, 2000).

Markle, doyenne of instructional design, had a passion for jazz that ran deep. She didn’t just listen to jazz; she wrote about it, taught others to appreciate it, and even edited videos for Jazz Times magazine (Jensen, 2009). And as if that weren’t enough, she also served as president of the Jazz Institute of Chicago.

This year, to recognize Markle’s extraordinary trajectory, she is being inducted into the Women in Behavior Analysis (WIBA) Hall of Fame. “The WIBA Hall of Fame was created with the mission to honor the accomplishments of female pioneers in the field of behavior analysis and create a historic record to educate behavior analysts on their contributions” (LeBlanc et al., 2023, p. 2). Join me in celebrating Markle and the women trailblazers of behavior analysis.

Photo of Susan Meyer Markle at a dinner at the Association for Behavior Analysis International, courtesy of T. V. Joe Layng.

References