Читать книгу Introduction to the scientific study of education - Charles Hubbard Judd - Страница 13

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As a third type of scientific study we may take certain recent laboratory investigations of reading. Reading is the most important subject taught in the schools; yet there are the widest differences in the results secured with different pupils. It is the duty of the schools to find out what constitutes the difference between good readers and bad readers, in order that both classes may be improved.

The method of these studies consists in photographing the reader’s eyes as they travel along printed lines. The number and length of the pauses are thus determined. It is found in general that competent readers see more at a glance than do poor readers. Furthermore, it is found that different types of reading are radically different; thus there is a marked difference between oral and silent reading. The importance of distinguishing these two types of reading lies in the fact that most of the teaching of reading in the elementary schools is by means of the oral method. Most of the demands of later life, and all of the demands made upon pupils when they study textbooks in geography and history and the other subjects of the school course, call for ability in silent reading. The results of investigations can be briefly stated in the following averages: the average numbers of pauses per line in oral reading for adults, high-school pupils, and elementary-school pupils, reading passages of different grades of difficulty, are 8.2, 8.6, and 8.1, while the corresponding averages for silent reading are 6.5, 7, and 6.3. These figures mean that the eye makes more pauses along a printed line when the reader is reading orally than when he is reading silently. Oral reading is therefore a more laborious, difficult form of reading. Furthermore, the time spent in each pause is greater in oral reading. The averages in thousandths of a second for oral reading for the three classes of readers are 380.8, 372.9, 398, while the corresponding figures for silent reading are 308.2, 311.1, and 314.5 These figures show that oral reading is slow as well as laborious.

It would require more discussion than is appropriate at this point to bring out the full meaning of such facts as these. Enough appears on the surface of the results, however, to make it quite evident that the school ought not to emphasize oral reading in the upper grades as it does to-day. The daily oral-reading drill in the seventh and eighth grades imposes on the pupils a slow, clumsy form of reading at a time when they ought to be cultivating the power of rapid silent reading.

It is by means of investigations of this kind that each of the subjects of instruction is being examined, and as a result schoolwork is increasingly developing effective methods of cultivating children’s intellectual powers. The work of analyzing each of the subjects will be slow and will require the coöperation of many investigators, but in several subjects, especially in the elementary schools, an encouraging beginning has been made.