How to meet Some of Children's Nature Interests 



E. Lawrence Palmer 

 Assistant Professor of Nature-Study Cornell University 



Just before the September 1921 Cornell Rural School Leaflet 

 went to press the Editor of that publication and the author of 

 this article received an interesting letter from a New York publish- 

 ing company. The company was trying to urge the sale of a 

 certain general science text book and in explaining the merits of 

 the book stated that the material in the book had been chosen 

 from questions which had been asked by children. An examina- 

 tion of the book showed an overwhelming abundance of material 

 on physical science but practically none in the field of biological 

 science. The title page of the book showed that its writer had 

 been a trained physicist which may have in some unexplained 

 way accoimted for the type of questions asked by the children. 



It was decided to make a similar examination of the questions 

 asked by rural school children in New York State, and accordingly 

 a questionnaire was inserted on the last page of the September 

 Leaflet, asking that the teachers return the slip stating what 

 Nature-Study questions they were being asked by their pupils. 

 The Leaflet and questionnaire were sent to between fifteen and 

 sixteen thousand rural teachers actually in service. Between 

 five and six thousand teachers have returned the blank, but only 

 one out of ten gave questions which were being asked by the pupisl. 

 The statistics given in this article are drawn from the first five 

 hundred questions submitted though more recently received 

 questions show no indication of varying greatly in their nature 

 from the first five hundred. 



• These questions were returned in such a way that there could 

 have been no personal influence to determine the nature of questions 

 asked. To be true, much of the material published in the Leaflet 

 has been of a biological nature, but as will be shown later, a 

 larger percent of the questions were asked concerning phases of 

 the work which have not yet received thorough attention, than 

 were asked concerning phases of biology which had been treated 

 more definitely. This should in a way at least indicate that the 



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