観察細部の枚挙と有効な観察との関係についての一考察

Inexperienced teachers often endeavor to make pupils tell, probably for the purpose of securing adequate observations on the part of the pupils, the details of the facts that have been presented before their eyes. This is an inadequate teaching effort which exists mainly due to the belief that the ability of mentioning minute details is of definite advantage to securing, efficiency of observation. The belief seems to be more obstinate in the case of untrained teachers using audiovisual materials. But experienced teachers know that such efforts are no good. It is necessary that experimental results obtained from situations similar to that of classroom teaching be able to defeat the wrong beliefs of the inexperienced teachers. The writer contrived a scheme of experiments in which he made use of simple cases of collision of elastic bodies - collisions which children must have seen, but perhaps have never confirmed their truth in their daily life. He obtained from his experiments two kinds of pupil responses: detailed accounts of the phenomenon on one hand, and descriptions of what had been conceived through observation of the same phenomena on the other. The writer had assumed that the 4th grade would definitely predominate over the 3rd grade both in detailed accounting records and efficient observation records. But in comparing the record percentages statistically, he found that the ability to mention minute details did not appear as being very different between the two grades. Accordingly, he tried the same comparison, first between the 4th grade and a college students' class, and then between the 3rd grade and the college students' class, respectively, and found that the only significant difference was the one between the 3rd grade and the college students' class. That is to say that children's ability in mentioning minute details does not achieve much progress. The writer then proceeded to examine the other data, that is, the sort of responses which had been presupposed to imply productive moments of observation. The results were very clear. The 4th grade predominated over the 3rd grade comparatively well, and the college students' class predominated over the 4th grade quite definitely. That is to say that efficient and fruitful observation is attained far more easily than mere ability in mentioning minute details. Moreover, further examination made it clear that there was no more than a very slight correlation between the two kinds of ability. From these results, the writer concludes that there may be almost no value in the audiovisual teacher endeavoring to require his or her pupils to mention every detail of what has been presented to them.