Structural communication

The technique was designed to encourage creative thinking in learners, allowing them to develop an understanding of a topic, not simply to memorize facts.

This may be an existing text, a video, a case study, a simulation, or real-life experience, depending on the overall strategy of the exercise.

A randomized array of items which summarize key parts, concepts or principles from the knowledge base that is being used and studied in the exercise.

A set of problems for solution, which are designed to present the "intellectual challenge" that is an essential part of the Structural Communication methodology.

To respond to a question, a student selects a number of items from the Response Array that, taken together, summarise what must be brought to bear on it.

Relative to any given question, the author ascribes values of "essential", "relevant", "irrelevant" and "misleading" to the items of the Response Array and builds his tests around them.

John G. Bennett's Teaching System [1] This gives an introduction to and description of the method and two educational applications, in physics and history, which can be tried out on line.

Work was done with the electronics company GEC to develop a teaching machine – the ‘Systemaster’ – because at this time there was little widespread use of computers.

Secondly, in place of a static array, each item was put onto a separate magnetic hexagon that could be attached to and moved on a suitable whiteboard.

It proved especially versatile in dealing with a wide range of numbers of people from single individual to many hundreds.