ABSTRACT
Olson in his provocative contribution states clearly his concern that excessive reliance on written instruction biases the student's perceptions and thoughts in an undesirable manner. Task analysis is important to the position taken by him, because it provides means for understanding why apparently equivalent instructional means produce different results and why apparently sufficient instructional messages fail their purpose. He points out that verbal knowledge cannot always be translated into appropriate acts, as illustrated in the ambiguous cliche about the gap between theory and practice. He makes substantial assumptions about the prevalence of reading assignments in primary and secondary schools. He portrays, with disturbing power, the narrowing and distorting effects of excessive reliance on print in learning concepts. He provides a valuable service in drawing attention to them even though he does so indirectly. The experiments reported by him provide convincing evidence that very gross descriptions of learned performance are misleading because this performance has important process substructures.
