Fred Simmons Keller (January 2, 1899 – February 2, 1996) was an American psychologist and a pioneer in experimental psychology.
Due to instability in his childhood, he left school at an early age to pursue employment as a Western Union telegrapher in Saranac Lake, New York.
He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1918 during World War I and served in Camp Jackson, South Carolina, in addition to active duty overseas in France and Germany.
Keller attended Harvard University for graduate school following his bachelor's degree in addition to teaching at Tufts.
Keller returned to the U.S. and was invited back to Brazil, this time to the University of Brazila, where he was instructed to continue the development of his new findings.
After his death, a memorial was held in San Francisco by the Association for Behavior Analysis, in which over two hundred people took part in.
Keller was also recognized for his "effects of his lectures on one student's behavior ... efficacy of his teaching" and "graceful flow of sentence into paragraph".
The book emphasized scientific methods in the study of psychology such as escape, avoidance, conflict, cooperation, imitation, verbal behavior, thinking, and concept formation.
Among their experiments, the students observed the responses of white rats to stimuli and rewards and measured human learning by testing people's ability to remember the pathways of mazes and other sensory processes.
He was the first to administer Skinner's previous findings into real-world applications by the process of transcribing auditory signals of Morse code into English.
The new method "represented an early application of the laws of learning to practical human affairs and served as a model for the study of several other skills"[1] and was awarded by President Truman a certificate of Merit in 1948.
He used hard-wire cloths, wooden frames, bent wire that acted as levers, pencils, watches, and cocktail stirrers.
He was asked to create a novel department, designed completely by him (carta branca), called "personalized system of instruction".
Keller's paper "Good-bye, teacher..." issued in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis in 1968 introduced the concept of Personalized System of Instruction (PSI).
[citation needed] When Keller returned to the US, he continued the work he had started in Brazil dealing with the personalized system of instruction.
Following Arizona State, Keller attended in 1967 the Institute for Behavioral Research located in Silver Spring, Maryland.