PAPERS ON PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 345 



RELATION OP QUICKNESS OF LEARNING AND 

 RETENTIVENESS 



H. A. Peterson, Illinois State Normal University, 



Normal 



From many different points of view educators are 

 working to individualize teaching. Investigations of in- 

 dividual differences in learning abilities and in retentive- 

 ness of learners should result in differentiating the length 

 of the study period for different members of a class, and 

 the amount and frequency of reviews needed to fix per- 

 manently in mind what has been learned. Educational and 

 psychological tests have furnished innumerable curves 

 showing the distribution of learning abilities in a hom- 

 ogeneous group of learners, but apprehension is only 

 half the story. Retention must be secured. "What is the 

 relation of speed of learning to retentiveness? 



Norsworthy, Pyle, Lyon, and others have studied the 

 relation of the rate of learning to retentiveness. They 

 agree that those who learn quickly retain a larger num- 

 ber of units than those who learn slowly, and in some 

 cases, as large a proportion of what has been learned, as 

 those who learn slowly. Lyon finds some exceptions to 

 the last statement. In the case of meaningful material 

 (prose or poetry) the quick learners sometimes retain an 

 even larger percentage of what they learn than the slow 

 learners, while in the case of mechanical material, such 

 as numbers, the quick learners do not retain as large a 

 percentage of their gains as the slow learners do of theirs. 



The present investigation is confined to one kind of 

 subject-matter, prose, and goes beyond the results of the 

 investigators mentioned : first, by using longer selections ; 

 secondly, by using larger groups of subjects ; and, thirdly, 

 by attempting to define more precisely the relation of 

 rate of learning to the amount retained. Another pur- 

 pose was to ascertain whether the material is suitable 

 for use as laboratory experiments for college classes. 



To a normal school class of 56 students a geographical 

 selection of 250 words was given in mimeograph form. 



