Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education — John Shaqi
Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of EducationOntario. Department of Education
Science
Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education
Ontario. Department of Education
Education; Educational psychology
=Problem Aids Control.=--It is true that in cases like the above, the
child may gain the required knowledge. The cause for this is, no doubt,
that the physical activity demanded of the pupil constitutes indirectly
a motive for attending sufficiently to gain the knowledge. But in many
cases no such conditions might exist. It is important, therefore, to
have the pupil as far as possible realize at the outset a definite
motive for each lesson. The advantage consists in the fact that the
motive gives a value to the ideas which enter into the new knowledge,
even before they are fully incorporated into a new experience. For
example, if in a lesson in geometrical drawing, the teacher, instead of
having the child set out with the problem of drawing a pair of parallel
lines, merely orders him to follow certain directions, and then requests
him to measure the shortest distance between the lines at different
points, the child is not likely to grasp the connections of the various
steps involved in the construction of the whole problem. This means,
however, that the learner has not secured an equal control over the new
experience.
=Pupils Feel Its Lack.=--A further objection to conducting a lesson in
such a way that the child may find no motive for the process until the
close of the lesson, is the fact that he is himself aware of its lack.
In school the child soon discovers that in a lesson he selects and gives
attention to various ideas solely in order to gain control over some
problem which he may more or less definitely conceive in advance. For
this reason, if the teacher attempts, as in the above examples, to fix
the child's attention on certain facts without any conception of
purpose, the pupil nevertheless usually asks himself the question: "What
does the teacher intend me to do with these facts?" Indeed, without at
least that motive to hold such disconnected ideas in his mind, it is
doubtful whether the pupil would attend to them sufficiently to organize
them into a new item of knowledge. When, therefore, the teacher proposes
at the outset an attractive problem to solve, he has gone a long way
toward stimulating the intellectual activity of the pupil. The setting
of problems, the supplying of motives, the giving of aims, the awakening
of needs--this constitutes a large part of the business of the teacher.
PUPIL'S MOTIVE
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