"One of the outstanding differences, in present practice, between the public and the Sunday school, is that most public school teachers ask too many questions and most Sunday school teachers do not ask questions enough. For the first half of this statement there is ample evidence in the careful study by Miss Ronniett Stevens on _The Question as a Measure of Efficiency in Instruction_. Miss Stevens secured complete stenographic reports of twenty high school lessons in English, history, science, Latin, modern languages, and mathematics; she observed one hundred more such lessons chosen at random, with a view to counting and noting the number and nature of the questions asked in each; and she followed each ten classes through an entire day's work for the purpose of studying the aggregate question-stimulus to which each was subjected in the course of the day. "The results of her study are surprising. In only eight of the twenty lessons completely reported the teacher asked less than ninety questions in the period of forty-five minutes, the average being sixty-eight. In each of the remaining twelve lessons more than ninety questions were asked in the same period of time, the average being 128. A freshman class in high school, in a day's work of five periods of forty minutes each, not counting gymnasium, was subjected to 516 questions and expected to return 516 answers, which is at the rate of 2:58 questions and 2:58 answers per minute. The lowest number of questions recorded in a day's work for a class was 321, and the average number 395. "Such rapid-fire questioning, Miss Stevens rightly holds, defeats its own ends. It maintains a nervous tension in the classroom that must in the long run be injurious. More than that, it is a symptom of the fact that the real work of the hour is being done by the teacher, and the pupil's share is reduced simply to brief, punctuation-like answers to the teacher's questions. Such questions appeal to mere memory or to superficial judgment rather than to real thought; they cultivate in the pupil neither independent judgment nor the power of expression; they ignore individual needs and discourage initiative; they make out of the classroom a place to display knowledge, rather than a laboratory in which to acquire it.