Experiments in Educational Psychology
- Author:
Daniel Starch, Ph.D. New York:
The Macmillan Company, 1911. Pp. viii + 183. The preface confirms the suggestion contained in the title, that this book is “designed to serve as a guide for laboratory experiments in educational psychology,” and Dr Starch adds, “no previous training in experimental work is necessary.” To carry out all the experiments in this manual, keeping a notebook record of the results, would constitute in itself no mean training in method. Chapter I introduces the question of individual differences in mental abilities, and four types of mental functions are selected for measurement,?memory, perception, controlled association, and arithmetical ability. Incidentally the student is shown how to tabulate his data and plot simple curves.
The subsequent chapters discuss visual tests and defects, auditory tests and defects, mental images, the trial and error method, the progress of learning, and the transference of learning, association, apperception, attention, memory, work and fatigue. In the chapter on trial and error, use is made of the very interesting experiment in which one traces with a pencil the outline of a six-pointed star which is seen only as reflected in a mirror. That sounds simple enough, but many surprises are in store for the unwary and overconfident experimenter. The errors are reckoned by counting every attempt to get back to the line which is being traced, and again the student is assisted in representing his results by means of a curve.
Many of these experiments in educational psychology can be recognized as friends of our youth, not greatly disguised by the academic diess they are wearing. Among them, the test which requires the crossing out of every e (or perhaps the filling in of every o) upon a certain page of printed matter, will be familiar to those who remember their childhood. So too will be the diverting occupation of making blots between two sheets of paper, and then guessing what they look like. It is evident, therefore, that besides being of service to the serious teacher and student of educational psychology for whom it was intended, Dr Starch’s book is capable of another and more frivolous adaptation. Many of his experiments would make capital “stunts” for whiling away a rainy day in the country or on shipboard. From this point of view they may be classed as scientific recreations, and yet lose none of their pedagogical importance by being found entertaining upon occasion.
In passing it may be remarked that the diagrams which illustrate the work are executed with something less than the perfection of draughtsmanship which one looks for in a book sponsored by the Macmillan Company.
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