BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES The references marked with an asterisk are especially recommended to beginners. General. —*1. MCMURRY, F. and C. The Method of the Recitation. (The Macmillan Company, 1903.) Chaps. ii and xi. The organization of large topics illustrated by sample lessons. Very practical. A sample project. —* 2. PARKER, EDITH P. A Sixth Grade English Unit. Elementary School Journal, October, 1914, Vol. XV, pp. 82–90. Excellent practical example of project method of organizing subject matter. Complete description of pupils' work. Topic, "Ships and Shipbuilding." Historical. * 3. PARKER, S. C. History of Modern Elementary Education. (Ginn and Company, 1912.) Chap. ix, on Rousseau's epochmaking appeal to psychologize teaching. Pp. 365-374, on Pestalozzi's alphabet methods organized from simple to complex. Psychological.-4. JAMES, WILLIAM. Principles of Psychology. (Henry Holt and Co., 1890.) Vol. I, chap. xiii and elsewhere. The source of many of the recent ideas of beginning with large meaningful topics instead of meaningless elements. Too technical for beginners. Kindergarten. .* 5. Temple, ALICE. Survey of the Kindergartens of Richmond, Indiana. (The University of Chicago Press, 1917.) Emphasizes large projects as centers of kindergarten activities. 6. Hill, Patty S., and others. Experimental Studies in Kindergarten Education. Teachers College Record, January, 1914, Vol. XV, pp. 1-70. A collection of papers revealing the transition from Froebel's devices to the use of larger projects. See especially pp. 4, 62–64. *6a. HILL, PATTY. The Kindergarten and the Elementary School. In Rapeer, L. W., Teaching Elementary School Subjects (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917), pp. 38–57. Excellent statement of organization of progressive kindergarten programs in terms of children's instincts. Geography. - 7. Course of Study in Geography in The University of Chicago Elementary School. Elementary School Journal, 1917, Vol. XVIII, pp. 11–30, 115–132, 186–205, 268–279. History. -*8. Course in Community Life, History and Civics in The University of Chicago Elementary School. Elementary School Journal, 1917, Vol. XVII, pp. 397-431, 485-520, 550-575, 627-649. References 7 and 8 may be purchased in separate form from the School of Education of The University of Chicago. History and Geography.-9. Course of Study in Geography and History in the Horace Mann School of Columbia University. Teachers College Record, March, 1913, Vol. XIV, pp. 78-83. Contains interesting sample lessons. PART II. LEARNING PROCESSES; GENERAL ASPECTS CHAPTER VI HOW CHILDREN LEARN; BY THEIR THE DOCTRINE OF SELF-ACTIVITY Main points of the chapter. I. This chapter continues the story of how children learn, which was begun at the end of the preceding chapter. 2. The term "learning' is used here in the broadest sense, to denote any change brought about in a pupil's methods of thinking, feeling, and behaving. 3. This chapter emphasizes the fact that the child learns through his own mental responses, reactions, or behavior. This is the doctrine of self-activity. 4. The teacher serves merely to stimulate the pupil's activity; hence we may distinguish teacher activity and pupil activity. 5. Pupil self-activity is often more influenced by other pupils than by the teacher. 6. Slow, dull teachers and rapid-fire nervous teachers are opposite extremes in the types of pupil self-activity which they arouse. 7. In complicated kinds of learning, a pupil's self-activity demands time and opportunity for mental experimentation and self-correction. 8. In such cases the artistic teacher shows great skill in inferring the internal mental responses of the pupil and giving the proper cues to modify them. Relation to Part I. In Part I of the book we developed certain fundamental points of view concerning the aims, management, and subject matter of elementary schools. These were summarized on page 155 as a transition to Part II. The last points in the summary emphasized the fact that the organization of subject matter is now being determined by the interests, capacities, and learning processes of the pupils. This is known as the psychological method of organization. Following the program proposed by Rousseau, it centers its attention upon the study of childhood; it studies the processes by which children learn most economically and effectively in order to determine how they should be taught. Since this psychological program is quite long, we shall devote a number of chapters, constituting Part II of this book, to a study of children's learning processes in general. This will leave for future discussion certain special types of learning, such as those involved in training children to read, to write, to spell, to solve problems, to understand and use general ideas, to express themselves in speaking, writing, and drawing, to enjoy music, games, and reading, to be interested in helping others, etc. Term "learning" has broad meaning; learning to think, to feel, to behave, etc. These various types of learning suggest that the term "learning" is being used here in a very broad way. Very often it has been used in school in a very narrow sense, suggesting merely memorizing of facts. Even the everyday use of the term, however, contains much broader suggestions than this, since we speak of children. learning to swim, to play the piano, to swear, to steal, to be obedient, to be disrespectful, to dislike poetry, to enjoy poetry, to exercise self-control, to use good judgment, etc. Moreover, in recent years psychologists have centered their attention and writing more and more upon many kinds of learning processes, and we find them studying how a monkey learns to open the door of a cage, whether he imitates other monkeys or not, how white mice learn to run blindfolded through complicated mazes, how human beings learn to open puzzle boxes, to solve puzzle problems, to memorize poetry, to draw simple figures, etc. Hence, the term "learning" no longer suggests mere memorizing of facts, but suggests any change that takes place in a pupil's methods of thinking or feeling or doing. For example, in thinking, he learns to analyze carefully a problem in arithmetic before beginning to "cipher"; in feeling, he learns to enjoy complicated harmonies or to dislike lying and swearing; in doing, he learns to pile blocks, to fold paper, to keep his desk in order, to write legibly, to find books in a library, to collect pictures and articles from magazines, etc. Precise, objective investigations of learning. In some of the psychological investigations of learning, scientific methods have been used which have the characteristics noted above on page 110; that is, they are mathematically precise, objective, etc. A simple example of experimentation which shows clearly its objective and precise character is found in the following description by Thorndike of the way little chickens learn to find their way out of a lonesome maze into the pleasant company of other chickens in the yard. Let a number of chicks, say six to twelve days old, be kept in a yard (YY of figure on page 160) adjoining which is a pen or maze (ABCDE). A chick is taken from the group and put in alone at A. It is confronted by a situation which is, in essence, confining walls and the absence of other chicks, food, and familiar surroundings. It reacts to the situation by running around, making loud sounds, and jumping at the walls. When it jumps at the walls it has the discomforts of thwarted effort, and when it runs to B or C or D, it has a continuation of the situation just described; [but] when it runs to E, it gets out and has the satisfaction of being with the other chicks, of eating, and of being in its usual habitat. If it is repeatedly put in again at A, one finds that it jumps and runs to B or C less and less often, until finally its only act is to run to D, E, and out. It has formed an association, or connection, or bond between the situation due to its removal to A and the response of going to E. In common language, it has learned to go to E when put at A, - has learned the way out. The decrease in useless running and jumping and standing still finds a representative in the decreas ing amount of time taken by the chick to escape. The two chicks that formed this particular asso ciation, for example, averaged three and a half minutes (one about three and the other about four) for their first five trials, but came finally to escape invariably within five or six seconds. (3: 125) In later chapters on the learning processes of pupils, we shall refer occasionally to such precise objective investi gations. Unfortunately, in the facts about learning to be discussed in this chapter, such precise experimental evidence is lacking and we shall have to base our account largely on opinion and common observation. The first fact which we shall note is very simple, yet it is so commonly disregarded, and is so important in determining the teacher's attitude, that we shall devote to it all of this first brief chapter on how children learn. |