These merits the reader can evaluate for himself for any given sort of work for a given class by considering: (1) The amount of practice received by the class per hour spent; (2) the ease of correction of the work; (3) the ease of understanding the tasks; (4) the prevention of cheating; (5) the cheerfulness and sociability of the work; (6) the freedom from eyestrain, and other less important desiderata.
It should be noted that the stock schemes A, B, C, and D below are only a few of the many that are possible and that schemes E, F, G, and H have special merits.
The common practice of either having no use made of pencil and paper or having all computations and even much verbal analysis written out elaborately for examination is unfavorable for learning. The demands which life itself will make of arithmetical knowledge and skill will range from tasks done with every percentage of written work from zero up to the case where every main result obtained by thought is recorded for later use by further thought. In school the best way is that which, for the pupils in question, has the best total effect upon quality of product, speed, and ease of production, reënforcement of training already given, and preparation for training to be given. There is nothing intellectually criminal about using a pencil as well as inner thought; on the other hand there is no magical value in writing out for the teacher's inspection figures that the pupil does not need in order to attain, preserve, verify, or correct his result.
| Presentation of Initial Situation | Management of Intermediate Processes | Announcement of Final Response |
|---|---|---|
| A. Printed or written | Written | Written |
| B. " " | Inner | Oral by one pupil, inner by the rest |
| C. Oral (by teacher) | Written | Written |
| D. " " | Inner | Oral by one pupil, inner by the rest |
| E. As in A or C | A mixture, the pupil writing what he needs | As in A or B or H |
| F. The real situation itself, in part at least | As in E | As in A or B or H |
| G. Both read by the pupil and put orally by the teacher | As in E | As in A or B or H |
| H. As in A or C or G | As in E | Written by all pupils, announced orally by one pupil |
The common practice of having the final responses of all easy tasks given orally has no sure justification. On the contrary, the great advantage of having all pupils really do the work should be secured in the easy work more than anywhere else. If the time cost of copying the figures is eliminated by the simple plan of having them printed, and if the supervision cost of examining the papers is eliminated by having the pupils correct each other's work in these easy tasks, written answers are often superior to oral except for the elements of sociability and 'go' and freedom from eyestrain of the oral exercise. Such written work provides the gifted pupils with from two to ten times as much practice as they would get in an oral drill on the same material, supposing them to give inner answers to every exercise done by the class as a whole; it makes sure that the dull pupils who would rarely get an inner answer at the rate demanded by the oral exercise, do as much as they are able to do.
Two arguments often made for the oral statement of problems by the teacher are that problems so put are better understood, especially in the grades up through the fifth, and that the problems are more likely to be genuine and related to the life the pupils know. When these statements are true, the first is a still better argument for having the pupils read the problems aided by the teacher's oral statement of them. For the difficulty is largely that the pupils cannot read well enough; and it is better to help them to surmount the difficulty rather than simply evade it. The second is not an argument for oralness versus writtenness, but for good problems versus bad; the teacher who makes up such good problems should, in fact, take special care to write them down for later use, which may be by voice or by the blackboard or by printed sheet, as is best.