QUESTIONS

1.  It has been experimentally determined that the ease with which one memorizes one set of facts may be very greatly improved without a corresponding improvement in ability to memorize in some other field.  How would you use this fact to refute the argument that we possess a general faculty of memory?

2.  How is it possible for a man to reason accurately in the field of engineering and yet make very grave mistakes in his reasoning about government or education?

3.  What assurance have we that skill or capacity for successful work developed in one situation will be transferred to another situation involving the same mental processes of habit formation, reasoning, imagination, and the like?

4.  What are the different types of identity which make possible transfer of training?

5.  How can we make the identity of methods of work most significant for transfer of training and for the education of the individual?

6.  Why do ideals which seem to control in one situation fail to affect other activities in which the same ideal is called for?

7.  Under what conditions may a very slight amount of transfer of training become of the very greatest importance for education?

8.  Why may we not hope for the largest results in training by compelling children to study that which is distasteful?  Do children (or adults) work hardest when they are forced to attend to that from which they derive little or no satisfaction?

9.  Which student gets the most significant training from his algebra, the boy who enjoys work in this field or the boy who worries through it because algebra is required for graduation from the high school?

10.  Why may we hope to secure more significant training in junior high schools which offer a great variety of courses than was accomplished by the seventh and eighth grades in which all pupils were compelled to study the same subjects?

11.  Why is Latin a good subject from the standpoint of training for one student and a very poor subject with which to seek to educate another student?

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XIII.  TYPES OF CLASSROOM EXERCISES

The exercises which teachers conduct in their classrooms do not commonly involve a single type of mental activity.  It is true, however, that certain lessons tend to involve one type of activity predominantly.  There are lessons which seek primarily to fix habits, others in which thinking of the inductive type is primarily involved, and still others in which deductive thinking or appreciation are the ends sought.  As has already been indicated in the discussion of habit, thinking, and appreciation in the previous chapters, these types of mental activity are not to be thought of as separate and distinct.  Habit formation may involve thinking.  In a lesson predominantly inductive or deductive, some element of drill may enter, or appreciation may be sought with respect to some particular part of the situation presented.  These different kinds of exercises, drills, thinking (inductive or deductive), and appreciation are fairly distinct psychological types.