Educational psychology . etermination. In thismethod of learning, we might say, there is a highbirth-rate and a high death-rate of responses. It is,therefore, likely to be a slow and wasteful Fig. 8 is shown the first trial, and in Fig. 9 thethird trial of a ten-year-old girl in tracing theoutline of a star while looking at its reflectionin a mirror. The first trial took 14 minutes 2seconds, the third trial 1 minute 56 seconds. Hercomment on the performance was: When I push itone way it goes another. Oh, this is quite an-tao-onistic! In addition to the loss of time and the THE LEARNI
Educational psychology . etermination. In thismethod of learning, we might say, there is a highbirth-rate and a high death-rate of responses. It is,therefore, likely to be a slow and wasteful Fig. 8 is shown the first trial, and in Fig. 9 thethird trial of a ten-year-old girl in tracing theoutline of a star while looking at its reflectionin a mirror. The first trial took 14 minutes 2seconds, the third trial 1 minute 56 seconds. Hercomment on the performance was: When I push itone way it goes another. Oh, this is quite an-tao-onistic! In addition to the loss of time and the THE LEARNING PROCESS 107 waste of energy which appear to characterize thismethod, there is a further difficulty, and that is thetask of foro-etting all th(> wrong ways of doing a thingand remembering only the right one. Some of thesewrong ways may have been repeated many times,and all of them have some tendency to recur, simplybecause they have once happened. We shall returnin a later paragraph to this question of how the right. Fig. 8. Fig. 9. way comes to be retained as against the more fre-quently experienced wrong ways. Learning by Impersonation, or Imitation.—Thesecond type of learning is a process in which onetakes advantage of the fact that somebody else canshow how the desired act is done. The term imi-tation has been used in so many different sensesthat it is better to choose for our purpose some lessequivocal expression, and the phra=e learning by 108 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY impersonation is here suggested for that kind oflearning which copies an act performed by anotherindividual. We need not discuss here the questionwhether impersonation is instinctive, nor whether itis practised by animals, but we may assume with-out argument that it does exist in human children,and that it is regularly employed as a means of in-struction in school. Showing how is, for someacts of skill, the only effective means of teaching,and a flexible and sympathetic impersonator readilyfalls in with
Size: 2209px × 1131px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookpublishernewyorkhholtandcom
