CHAPTER XIII
THE CONDITIONS OF LEARNING
We shall consider in this chapter the influence of time of day, size of class, and amount of time devoted to arithmetic in the school program, the hygiene of the eyes in arithmetical work, the use of concrete objects, and the use of sounds, sights, and thoughts as situations and of speech and writing and thought as responses.[17]
EXTERNAL CONDITIONS
Computation of one or another sort has been used by several investigators as a test of efficiency at different times in the day. When freed from the effects of practice on the one hand and lack of interest due to repetition on the other, the results uniformly show an increase in speed late in the school session with a falling off in accuracy that about balances it.[18] There is no wisdom in putting arithmetic early in the session because of its difficulty. Lively and sociable exercises in mental arithmetic with oral answers in fact seem to be admirably fitted for use late in the session. Except for the general principles (1) of starting the day with work that will set a good standard of cheerful, efficient production and (2) of getting the least interesting features of the day's work done fairly early in the day, psychology permits practical exigencies to rule the program, so far as present knowledge extends. Adequate measurements of the effect of time of day on improvement have not been made, but there is no reason to believe that any one time between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. is appreciably more favorable to arithmetical learning than to learning geography, history, spelling, and the like.
The influence of size of class upon progress in school studies is very difficult to measure because (1) within the same city system the average of the six (or more) sizes of class that a pupil has experienced will tend to approximate closely to the corresponding average for any other child; because further (2) there may be a tendency of supervisory officers to assign more pupils to the better teachers; and because (3) separate systems which differ in respect to size of class probably differ in other respects also so that their differences in achievement may be referable to totally different differences.
Elliott ['14] has made a beginning by noting size of class during the year of test in connection with his own measures of the achievements of seventeen hundred pupils, supplemented by records from over four hundred other classes. As might be expected from the facts just stated, he finds no appreciable difference between classes of different sizes within the same school system, the effect of the few months in a small class being swamped by the antecedents or concomitants thereof.
The effect of the amount of time devoted to arithmetic in the school program has been studied extensively by Rice ['02 and '03] and Stone ['08].
Dr. Rice ['02] measured the arithmetical ability of some 6000 children in 18 different schools in 7 different cities. The results of these measurements are summarized in Table 10. This table "gives two averages for each grade as well as for each school as a whole. Thus, the school at the top shows averages of 80.0 and 83.1, and the one at the bottom, 25.3 and 31.5. The first represents the percentage of answers which were absolutely correct; the second shows what per cent of the problems were correct in principle, i.e. the average that would have been received if no mechanical errors had been made."