Ten students in a personalized university course were given target dates for completing each of 26 lessons. The lessons could be completed before those dates, but not after. The first two failures to complete a lesson by the target date led to "warnings"; the next failure required the student to withdraw from the course. When each student's rate of lesson completion was compared with and without target dates, it was found that students completed an average of 1.0 lesson a day with the target-date contingency and 0.3 without it. Individual data indicated that most students did few or no lessons without the contingency. It was conduded that a target-date contingency is an effective method for maintaining student progress in personalized university courses. Keller (1968) described a system of personalized instruction suitable for higher education that is now being widely used in many fields (PSI Newsletter, 1970). This system usually involves frequent testing of students over small portions of the course, the requirement that the student continue working on each section of the course until he demonstrates mastery, the use of students who have previously taken the course as proctors, and the possibility for the student to progress through the course at his own pace. A number of group-design studies have shown that this general methodology produces a higher average level of student performance on major exams

Three experiments analyzed the effectiveness of a textbook incorporating "concept programming" in producing concept formation in university students. The concept programming portion of each lesson requires students to determine which concept is illustrated by each of 20 short fictional stories about everyday behavioral situations. The stories are selected to illustrate and contrast the concepts of that lesson. Student responses are heavily prompted during the initial stories of each lesson. The first experiment demonstrated that students generalize to entirely novel examples from the examples in the textbook. The second experiment demonstrated that the concept programming portion of the textbook is a critical component in producing generalization. The third experiment demonstrated that the amount of concept formation produced by the concept programmed textbook is greater than that produced by a widely used standard textbook.

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