Teaching selected office management concepts by a procedural approach and a behavioral approach

The purposes of this study were to describe the teaching strategies for teaching selected management concepts by a procedural and a behavioral approach; and to illustrate the teaching strategies using selected management concepts according to a procedural and a behavioral approach.

In order to obtain research studies pertinent to this study, a computer-assisted search of educational literature identified in the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) system was conducted. This data base included entries from Research In Education (RIE) and Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE). The studies included research in education and teaching resource materials.

In order to develop the procedural and behavioral teaching techniques, books about learning theories were reviewed containing the information about procedural and behavioral approaches. The principles were abstracted and guidelines for the procedural and behavioral approaches were then summarized. These guidelines were reviewed by the members of the writer's committee.

In order to illustrate the application of these procedural and behavioral guidelines, three management concepts were selected with the aid of the members of the writer's thesis committee. The concepts were as follows: Communications, Budgeting, and Human Relations.

The major findings of the study are summarized as follows:

1. In learning, the tendency is to generalize insights into understandings and apply them in other instances where conditions are similar. The understandings or generalizations are tested by trying them in active experiences. If they have no practical value, they are eliminated. If they do have practical value, they become a part of the intellectual make-up and contribute to intelligent behavior until they are changed or discarded.

2. Knowledge of principles through teacher directed student activities provide an important basis for improved learning in the procedural approach. Comprehension of concepts and the student's ability to transfer this knowledge to similar but new and different situations is not necessarily required.

On the part of students, behavioral learning requires more active participation, intellectual inquiry, and more imagination and more creativeness. Behavioral learning is supposed to lead to the development of classroom atmosphere that is more alive and exciting, more critical and penetrating, and more open to fresh and original thinking. The type of inquiry pursued by a behavioral class is supposed to be more rigorous and "work producing" than that pursued in a procedural learning situation. If only the generalized insights were accomplished, no claims could be made for behavioral teaching which could not also be made for procedural teaching. However, within genuine behavioral teaching, students learn the very nature of techniques of problem-solving processes.

3. Behavioral teaching and learning leads to understandings just as does procedural teaching and learning; but with behavioral, the search for understandings is pursued in a different fashion from the procedural approach. Instead of students being given a collection of facts and generalizations as in procedural, the students are confronted with something problematic-either unclear or puzzling. That which distinguishes behavioral from procedural teaching and learning is the presence of problems that students feel a need to solve. At the outset of a study, the teacher presents a real question for which students have no answer, or at least no adequate one. Through the study, the students and teacher, working cooperatively, develop what is for them a new or more adequate solution. Although the teacher performs a unique function in a classroom in relation to a group of students, the teacher is still a part of the group as its members participate in the learning process.

4. There are three steps to follow in the procedural approach of teaching-preparation, presentation, and application.

5. A teacher using the procedural approach seeks to acquaint students with relationships between a generalization (principle) and the particulars (solitary facts). Procedural teaching provides the students with a generalized set of rules for problem solving. The teacher tells and the students listen or the teacher stimulates and the students respond.

6. There are three steps to follow in the behavioral approach of teaching-purposing, planning and executing, and judging.