A very interesting statement of one of our contemporaries is that any person, to one degree or another, is both a psychologist and a philosopher - they say, life forces him to. On the one hand, the main driving force of every person is the craving for knowledge, the desire to reach certain social heights, the desire to be wise in any everyday situations - and this is the philosophy of life. Psychology by Robert S. Woodworth (intellectual books to read .TXT) 📖
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Perhaps, after all, the greatest advantage of reciting is that it makes you do, in learning, the very act that you have later to perform in the test; for what you have finally to do is to recite the lesson without the book. When reading, you are doing something different; and if it were altogether different, it probably would not help you at all towards success in the test. But since intelligent reading consists partly in anticipating and outlining as you go, it is a sort of half recitation, it is halfway doing what you are trying to learn to do. Memorizing consists in performing an act, now, with assistance, that you later wish to perform without assistance; and recitation first stimulates you to fashion the act conformably to the object in view, and then exercises you in performing that act.
Spaced and unspaced repetition.Another question on the economical management of memorizing: Is it better to keep steadily going through the lesson till you have it, or to go through it at intervals? If you were allowed a certain time, and no more, in which to prepare for examination on a certain memory lesson, how could the study time be best distributed? This question also has received a very definite answer.
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Spaced repetitions are more effective than unspaced. In an experiment of Piéron, a practised subject went through a list of twenty numbers with an interval of only thirty seconds between readings, and needed eleven readings to master the list. But a similar list, with five-minute intervals, was mastered in six readings; and the number of readings went down to five with an interval of ten minutes, and remained the same for longer intervals up to two days. With this particular sort of lesson, then, ten minutes was a long enough interval, and two days not too long, to give the greatest economy of time spent in actual study.
In a somewhat different experiment in another laboratory, lists of nonsense syllables were studied either two, four, or eight times in immediate succession, and this was repeated each day till a total of twenty-four readings had been given to each list; then, one day after the last reading of each list, the subjects were tested as to their memory of it. The result appears in the adjoining table.
EFFECT OF SPACED STUDY ON ECONOMY OF MEMORIZING (From Jost)
Distribution of
the 24 readings Total score Total score
of Mr. B. of Mr. M.
8 readings a day for 3 days 18 7
6 readings a day for 4 days 39 31
2 readings a day for 12 days 58 55
The widest distribution gave the best score. Undoubtedly, then, if you had to memorize a poem or speech, you would get better value for time spent if you read it once or twice at a time, with intervals of perhaps a day, than if you attempted to learn it at one continuous sitting. What exact spacing would give the very greatest economy would depend on the length and character of the lesson.
Spaced study also fixes the matter more durably. Every student knows that continuous "cramming" just before an {343} examination, while it may accomplish its immediate purpose, accomplishes little for permanent knowledge.
When we say that spaced repetitions give best results in memorizing, that does not mean that study generally should be in short periods with intervals of rest; it says nothing one way or the other on that question. The probability is, since most students take a certain time to get well "warmed up" to study, that fairly long periods of consecutive study would yield larger returns than the same amount of time divided into many short periods. What we have been saying here is simply that repetition of the same material fixes it better in memory, when an interval (not necessarily an empty interval) elapses between the repetitions.
Whole versus part learning.In memorizing a long lesson, is it more economical to divide it into parts, and study each part by itself till mastered, or to keep the lesson entire and always go through the whole thing? Most of us would probably guess that study part by part would be better, but experimental results have usually been in favor of study of the whole.
If you had to memorize 240 lines of a poem, you would certainly be inclined to learn a part at a time; but notice the following experiment. A young man took two passages of this length, both from the same poem, and studied one by the whole method, the other by the part method, in sittings of about thirty-five minutes each day. His results appear in the table.
LEARNING PASSAGES OF 240 LINES, BY WHOLE AND PART METHODS
(Pyle and Snyder)
Method of study Number Total number
of days of minutes
required required
30 lines memorized per day,
then whole reviewed till it
could be recited 12 431
3 readings of whole per day
till it could be recited 10 348
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Here there was an economy of eighty-three minutes, or nearly twenty per cent., by using the whole method as against the part method. Similar experiments have regularly given the same general result.
However, the matter is not quite so simple, as, under certain conditions, the results tend the other way. Let us consider a very different type of learning test. A "pencil maze", consisting of passages or grooves to be traced out with a pencil, while the whole thing was concealed from the subject by a screen, was so arranged that it could be divided into four parts and each part learned separately. Four squads of learners were used. Squads A and B learned the maze as a whole, squads C and D part by part. Squads A and C learned by spaced trials, two trials per day. Squad B learned the whole thing at one sitting; while squad D, which came off best of all, learned one part a day for four days, and on the fifth day learned to put the parts together. The results appear in the adjoining table, which shows the average time required to master the maze by each of the four methods.
PART AND WHOLE LEARNING, SPACED AND UNSPACED,
IN THE PENCIL MAZE (From Pechstein)
Spaced trials Unspaced trials
Whole learning A 641 seconds B 1250 seconds
Part learning C 1220 seconds D 538 seconds
When the trials were spaced, the whole method was much the better; but when the trials were bunched, the part method was much the better; and, on the whole, the unspaced part learning was the best of all. Thus the result stands in apparent contradiction with two accepted laws: that of the advantage of spaced learning, and that of the advantage of whole learning.
This contradiction warns us not to accept the "laws" {345} too blindly, but rather to analyze out the factors of advantage in each method, and govern ourselves accordingly. Among the factors involved are the following four:
(1) The factor of interest, confidence and visible accomplishment--the emotional factor, we might call it. This is on the side of part learning, especially with beginners, who soon feel out of their depth when wading into a long lesson, and lose hope of ever learning it in this way. This factor is also largely on the side of unspaced as against spaced learning, when the part studied is of moderate length and when there are recitations to keep up the interest; for when the learner sees he is getting ahead, he would rather keep right on than wait for another day to finish. To have a task that you can hope to accomplish at once, and to attack it with the intention of mastering it at once, is very stimulating.
(2) The factor of recency, of "striking while the iron is hot". When an act has just been successfully performed it can easily be repeated, and when a fact has just been observed it can readily be put to use. This factor is clearly on the side of unspaced learning; and it is also on the side of part learning, since by the time you have gone through the whole long lesson and got back to where you are now, the recency value of what you have just now accomplished will have evaporated.
(3) The factor of meaning, outlining and broad relationships. This is on the side of whole learning, for it is when you are going through the whole that you catch its general drift, and see the connections of the several parts and their places in the whole. This factor is so important as to outweigh the preceding two in many cases, especially with experienced learners dealing with meaningful material. Even if you should prefer the part method, you would be wise to begin by a careful survey of the whole.
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(4) The factor of permanency. This is something "physiological", and it is on the side of spaced learning. The muscles profit more by exercise with intervals of rest than by a large amount of continuous exercise, and no athlete would think for a moment of training for a contest of strength by "cramming" for it. Apparently the neurones obey the same law as the muscles, and for that reason spaced learning gives more durable results than unspaced.
Unintentional LearningWhat we have been examining is intentional memorizing, with the "will to learn" strongly in the game. The assertion has sometimes been made that the will to learn is necessary if any learning is to be accomplished. We must look into this matter, for it has an important bearing on the whole question of the process of learning.
There is a famous incident that occurred in a Swiss psychological laboratory, when a foreign student was supposed to be memorizing a list of nonsense syllables. After the list had been passed before him many times without his giving the expected signal that he was ready to recite, the experimenter remarked that he seemed to be having trouble in memorizing the syllables. "Oh! I didn't understand that I was to learn them", he said, and it was found that, in fact, he had made almost no progress towards learning the list. He had been observing the separate syllables, with no effort to connect them into a series.
Another incident: subjects were put repeatedly through a "color naming test", which consisted of five colors repeated in irregular order, the object being to name the one hundred bits of color as rapidly as possible. After the subjects had been through this test over two hundred times, you would think they could recite it from memory; but not {347} at all! They had very little memory of the order of the bits of color. Their efforts had been wholly concentrated upon naming the bits as seen, and not in connecting them into a series that could be remembered.
The experiment described a few pages back on "paired associates" is another case in point. The subjects memorized the pairs, but made no effort to connect the pairs in order, and consequently were not able later to remember the order of the pairs.
Many somewhat similar experiments have been performed, with the object of measuring the reliability of the testimony of eye-witnesses; and it has been found that testimony is very unreliable except for facts that were specifically noted at the time. Enact a little scene before a class of students who do not suspect that their memory of the affair is later to be tested, and you will find that their memory for many facts that were before their eyes is hazy, absent, or positively false.
These facts all emphasize the importance of the will to learn. But let us consider another line of facts. An
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