362 ANNALS NEW YORE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



remarks of both girls and boys. Emotional attitudes, actions and even 

 words were ascribed to the pictorial persons. At 15, the remarks be- 

 came more laconic, but what was said was significant and definite as 

 to the persons, place and action of the picture. This age marked the 

 first signs of hesitation in speaking of the pictures of sentiment. Up 

 to the age of nine the remarks had been very naive ; after that the 

 pictures were dismissed with the phrase, "they're lovers" or "a love pic- 

 ture" ; often the characters were named Eomeo and Juliet, Paul and 

 Virginia, etc. 



In all their comments the girls were far more personal than the boys. 

 The personal pronoun and references to their individual experiences 

 were the usual preface to their statements. With the boys it was quite 

 otherwise; they discussed the picture as an objective thing, independent 

 of their conscious existence. Boys tended to locate scenes in definite 

 historical time and specific geographic places. 



The effect of uncertainty about a picture, crudely averaged, was a 

 displacement of about five places toward the lower end of the scale. 



Dr. Kirby said in abstract: This experiment was conducted to get 

 some information concerning (1) the value of the practise experiment 

 as a method for school work and (2) the value of practise periods of 

 different lengths. 



339 fourth year children belonging to 10 different classes took part 

 in the practise, which consisted of adding columns, each of 10 numbers, 

 0's and l's not included, as rapidly as was consistent with accuracy, 

 each child competing with his own past record. Seven different sheets 

 of columns of equal difficulty were used (Thorn dike's Addition Sheets). 



In every case there was one hour of practise, but for different classes 

 this hour. was broken into 22y 2 -, 15-, and 6-minute periods, an initial 

 15-minute period and a final 15-minute period being given to form 

 the basis for determining the gain per cent. 



The hour's practise for the 339 children taken as one group resulted 

 in an average gain of 55 per cent.; median gain of 48 per cent. In a 

 similar test with 19 university students, Professor Thorndike found 

 an average gain of 29 per cent., median 33 per cent, from about 53 

 minutes of practise, and said: "The amount of improvement in this 

 experiment may also add to our confidence that the method of the 

 practise experiments wherein one works at one's limit and competes 

 with one's past record may well be made a regular feature in many 

 school drills. Even if the same length of time produced in children a 

 percentile improvement, only half as great as here, the gain would still 

 probably be far greater than the gain by any of the customary forms of 

 drill." " 



