Frederic E. Clements 
198 
plans is usually the best. Even more important is the planning of 
observation and experiment. In the light of experience it seems little 
short of useless to give the student detailed directions for each 
experiment, and the laboratory manual appears to be downright 
harmful in depriving the student of the opportunity of organizing 
his own work. Here the preferred method is to allow each student 
to work out a plan independently, and then to take these up in the 
discussion to obtain the group judgment as to the most promising 
methods. Dissenting opinions, however, must always be respected 
and put to the test, in order to lead the students to recognize that 
opinions, majority or otherwise, can be separated into wheat and 
chaff only by experiment and measurement. The execution of 
observation and experiment is an individual matter, but there are 
projects in which it is desirable and sometimes necessary to organize 
the students in groups. The responsibility of the student does not 
end with the completion of the experiment. He must first dismantle 
his apparatus, and return material and supplies to their proper 
places in condition for immediate use. Much more important, he 
must turn to the organization and interpretation of his results as 
the most essential feature of the entire project. 
This is done in such a way as to give the memory and the power 
of thinking the maximum opportunity for development. No note¬ 
book is kept, though tables of readings and similar data are per¬ 
mitted. The teacher who requires that everything be entered in the 
lecture and laboratory notebooks will be highly sceptical as to this, 
but, if he subscribe to the statement that the relative values can be 
determined only by experiment, it is exceedingly probable that he 
will ultimately dispense with both. At any rate, no class so far 
studied has failed to prove that notebooks of all sorts almost com¬ 
pletely inhibit the proper functioning of the memory and thinking 
processes. It has been found that the repeated handling of the 
results by the individual and by the group, and their constant use 
in succeeding projects and discussions renders them -permanently 
available, the ability of the mind to respond to such conditions 
being quite beyond the belief of one who employs traditional 
methods. 
While the student must feel individually responsible for his 
results and for giving them meaning, complete values can be obtained 
only through the group discussion. This is essentially an exchange of 
experiences and interpretations made with entire informality, but 
so guided by the teacher that actual progress is made and definite 
