24U president's address — section J, 



The E.rperi/nenfal Stiidf/ of Tcdchhifj I'roccdurc . 



The study of the relative eifectiveness of different forms of 

 teaching procedure has so far received but little attention. Yet 

 it is a field of investigation in which results of great value to the 

 practising teacher may be expected, for at" present the conflict of 

 opinion among teachers as to the relative merits of different teach- 

 ing methods is very considerable. The measurement of the rela- 

 tive effectiveness of different methods of teaching presents many 

 difficulties, since it is hard to isolate thei factor of teaching pro- 

 cedurei. Toi do so we must either measure the influence of other 

 factors such as age, sex, social status, innate ability, competence 

 of the teacher, and so on, and this in general is not as yet 

 possible, or we must keep these factors constant while vary- 

 ing the method used. To do this latter requires much skill in 

 planning the experiment; Winch's method of " equal groups " is 

 perhaps the most important device so' far employed for making 

 comparison possible between two different teaching methods. 



Briefly this inethod consists in selecting as homogeneous a group 

 of pupils as possible to' act as subjects of the experiment. This 

 group is then given a preliminary test in the subject matter to>_be 

 taught. On the results of this test the group is divided into sets 

 by the selection of pupils alternately from the order of merit given 

 by the preliminary test. We now have two parallel sets whose 

 average ability is equal within the limits of "chance error. Each 

 set is now given a series of lessons where all conditions as to time 

 of day, length of lesson, quantity and kind of subject matter are 

 kept the same, with the exception of the method of teaching 

 adopted. After the completion of the series of lessons the sets 

 are again grouped, and a final test is given to- the original group. 

 If now there is any difference in the achievement of the two sets 

 beyond what might be expected from chance we may conclude 

 that it is probably due to the method of teaching adopted. 



This method has been employed by Valentine for the comparisoai 

 of a phonic with a whole word method of teaching reading ; by 

 Winch in the study of a directed, as compared with a more in- 

 dividual, method of learning the spelling of word lists, and again 

 in comparing speed and accuracy in subtraction when taught by 

 the method of decomposition and by the method of equal addition. 



Thesei experiments are of interest not merely because of the 

 immediate conclusions to which they point, but because they sug- 

 gest lines of inquiry of far reaching importance for the science of 

 education. Valentine found that although on the whole a phonic 

 method of teaching reading was more effective than a whole word 

 method, yet this conclusion did not hold for the duller members 

 o: the groups tested. Even where the phonic set was on the whole 

 superior to the whole word set, it M'as fcund that the superioritv 

 was due to the upper half of the set. The lower half was little if 



