Elements of Educational Psychology (Иностранный язык в профессиональной сфере — психология). Учебное пособие

Lastly, attention is very helpful to remembering.

Conditions ofAttention

There are certain factors of advantage in the securing and holding attention. Let us discuss those factors of advantage or conditions, which determine the passage of stimuli from the field of inattention to that of attention. Such conditions are of two kinds:

•objective;

•subjective.

The first of objective conditions is an intensity of a stimulus. Other factors being equal, a strong or intense stimulus will attract attention. Thus, a loud noise has the advantage over a low murmur.

The second is a size. A large building will be more readily attended to than a small hut.

The third is a change. To attract attention the change should not be gradual but sudden.

Fourthly, a repetition also secures attention. Objects presented repeatedly cannot help being attended to.

The fifth is a novelty and a contrast. New objects or objects different from what we are used to attract attention more rapidly.

The subjective conditions determining attention may be summed up in one word, an interest.We attend to objects in which we are interested in. Interest means making a difference. It is obvious that two factors:attentionandinterestareinseparableandtheydevelopsimultaneously. Ordinarily interest is less dependent on the objects outside than simple attention; it is more a function of the person himself.

Interest is both cognitive and affective. When we are interested in an object,weobserveandstudyit,wewanttoknowmoreaboutit,itgivesus afeelingofsatisfactionandwemayacttochangeitorkeepitunchanged.

Sources of Interest

Theprimarysourceofanyinterestistobefoundinournativedesires and urges, instincts, primary needs and motives. Instincts and needs give the individual a certain impetus to act which we call a drive.Adrive is an urge or push from within, it has no direction but just focused energy with the help of which the individual acquires goals and purposes.Amotive is

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a drive with the help of which learning acquires a direction through aims, objects, goals and purposes.These motives are springs of interest.

Interest is the pleasure tone of self-activity and is a great asset to teaching and learning. Making lessons interesting does not mean making them easy and simple but arousing, stimulating or directing learners’ interests at the lesson. Interest is a subjective feeling. Interests and efforts are not opposed to each other. When an effort brings achievement and satisfaction, it inspires learners with a new zest and enthusiasm and is converted into an interest.

How toArouse Interest at the Lesson

Attention is one of the major problems of education. To arouse interest the teacher should recognize the learners’interests, their variations depending on the age, should know the differences arising at different stages of interest development. The centre of teaching is the learner, not the lesson, and it is the lesson that is to be adapted to the needs and interests of the learner, not the learner to the lesson. The teacher should be familiar with these needs and interests and adjust both the subject-matter and the methods of teaching to the capabilities and mental development of his learners.

This leads to the second principle. Interest cannot be aroused unless we justify to the learners the value and importance of what they are going to learn. Most teachers begin their day’s work with a commonplace fact and lead the class to the lesson through stages, which impress upon the class the need and value of the new knowledge. Such lessons are attended to with interest.

Thirdly, all new knowledge should be related to that what the class already possesses.

Fourthly,theteachershouldavoid monotony,forthatkillstheinterest.

Lastly, the teacher should approach the class and his work of teaching with great enthusiasm and interest.This fact about the teacher’s attitude cannot be overemphasized.Ateacher who enters the class smartly, smiling and giving a good impression about his earnestness and interest in his work, will receive greater consideration, attention and interest at the hands of his learners than the one who is listless,

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indifferent and tired. There are teachers who fill the classroom with the atmosphere charged with electricity, their mere presence sends a wave of enthusiasm among learners, and they are able to secure attention and interest by a mere look, a question or a gesture.Their vitality, sense of humor, interest and love for work do the trick.

Feelings in learners are expressed by the so-called positive and negative responses. The positive responses of moving towards the stimulus, to keep it before consciousness, to obtain, hold or possess it, indicate pleasure, satisfaction or pleasantness of the stimuli. The negative responses of moving away from the stimuli, to avoid or escape it, indicate annoyance, dissatisfaction or displeasure.

Sensation and Feeling

The contrast between cognition and affection, sensation and feeling is well marked. Firstly, feeling is blunted by repetition. Objects lose their pleasantness or unpleasantness if they are presented repeatedly. The sweetest song repeated again and again becomes stale; quinine loses its bitterness if we have to take it every day.

But the oftener the sensations are repeated, the clearer grows our knowledge about their objects. Feelings grow weaker and weaker until it disappears altogether. Sensations become better defined and more serviceable.

Secondly, sensations are objective, feelings are subjective. To some extent sensations are determined by the objects. If we speak about the feelings, we can say that they are personal.

Thirdly, sensations can be easily attended to, selected and ob­ served, become clearer when are brought into attentive consciousness, while feelings tend to grow until they disappear.

Fourthly, sensations are “localized”. Some definite object is presented and a particular sense organ is stimulated. But a certain feeling is diffused over the whole system.

Fifthly,distinctaffectivestatescannotexistsidebysideinthe same pulse of consciousness. Feelings get fused. We cannot be pleased or displeased at the same time. However, two or more sensations may exist together in consciousness at the same time. This is because nu-

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merous stimuli may be present in a number of sense organs or even one stimulus may give rise to a number of sensations.

Feeling is always present in consciousness though it is noticed only when it is pronounced.

Emotions

An emotion is more than a feeling. An emotion is outwardly directed, it is the starting-point of an overt action, though sometimes the action is inhibited before expression. Feeling, on the other hand, is inwardlydirected.Theemotionsofanger,fear,griefandthelikearenot mere pleasures or displeasures but tendencies to know and act as well.

Summary

1.Asattentionistheheartoftheconsciousprocess,itisanattitude of readiness or preparedness for an action.The process of attention has all the tree aspects of conscious life: knowing, feeling, willing.Attention is selective.

2.Attention and interest are inseparable and they develop simul-

taneously. Ordinarily interest is less dependent on the objects outside than simple attention; it is more a function of the person himself.

3.Interest is the pleasure tone of self-activity and is a great asset to teaching and learning. Making lessons interesting does not mean making them easy and simple but arousing, stimulating or directing learners’interests at the lesson. Interest is a subjective feeling.

4.Attention is one of the major problems of education. To arouse interest the teacher should recognize the learners’interests, their variations depending on the age, should know the differences arising at different stages of interest development.

Study questions and tasks

1.What is attention? Speak about the nature of attention.

2.Why is attention important?

3.What are the marks of the process of attention?

4.How can we hold and secure attention?

5.Attention and interest are inseparable, aren’t they? Prove it.

6.How can the teacher arouse the pupils’interest?

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Chapter 8

Memory

The Nature of Memory

The term “memory” is used to mean an act of remembering some particular event but the formal definitions attempted by several psychologists do not agree with each other. Stout defines it as the idealrevival, as far as an ideal revival is merely reproductive, in which the objects of the experience are reinstated as far as possible in the order and manner of their original occurrence. Some writes like Beatrice Edgell use the word memory as involving learning, retention, recall and recognition. Others use memory not only for acts of retaining and recalling but also for receiving impressions. R. Woodworth regards memory as involving learning, retention, recall and recognition.

We will not attempt any hard and fast definition but describe the main factors involved in memory. There are four of them:

•registration or the reception of impressions;

•retention or conserving of experiences;

•reproduction or recall of experiences;

•recognition or identifying the recalled ideas as known before

in the previous experience.

Each of these factors is equally important. Memory does not consist of reproducing or recalling previous experiences, as students commonly understand it. It involves all the four factors.

The first, registration, is merely the existence of experience; without having experienced anything, it is absurd to try or presume to recall it. Experience is the first pre-condition.

Secondly, such experiences must be retained or conserved in some form or the other.

The mindmust hold experiencesinitsgraspasit were, before they can be reproduced or recalled which is the third element in memory.

Fourthly, on recall, such ideas and images must be recognized as our own.

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Finally, as Stout emphasizes, memory should specially refer to those cases in which the power of retentiveness gives rise to the definite revival, reinstatement as he calls it, of some portion of experience, in the form of ideas and images.

Impressions

An impression is a question of the differences of interest and at­ tention. The person who is not deeply interested in the task constantly wanders away to more alluring fields. Attention is scattered, recalled ideas are vague, confused and fleeting.

Impressions received more vividly and distinctly are better remembered. The more intense and vivacious the impression, the longer it is remembered.

Repetition of even ordinary experiences helps remember them. Lessons frequently repeated are at our finger’s end. But mere repetition will not suffice unless it is frequent, recent and regular. This factor comes into play so often in education that it needs a more detailed treatment.

The Value of Repetition

Many pupils and teachers believe that the best way of remembering is ceaseless repetition. Repetition means:

•bringing into attention again and again the items with the help of which we wish to be associated;

•exercising that association.

Experiments have shown that items repeated more often are remembered longer than those that repeated less often. Repetition helps the pupils make the material their own.

Learners have a strong impulse to repeat rhymes, tables and lessons from their readers and one frequently meets a child who knows his primer by heart. The teacher should certainly make use of this impulse and make pupils learn a number of useful things. It must be accompanied by understanding and interest, there must be a motive to learn and a concentration of attention on the subject. The teacher should encourage pupils to understand things clearly and then leave

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them alone to find out what degree of repetition each of them will need to learn a certain item. The length of repetition depends on the individual pupil’s span of attention. If he is not able to attend to an item for a long time, repetition should be useless.

Should repetition be spaced? Experimental studies show that a daily program of short periods in which topics can be repeated frequently is better than a prolonged single period.

Woodworth describes an experiment on part and whole learning. In committing a poem to memory is it more economical to learn it part by part or to go through the whole poem again and again until it is mastered? Woodworth goes on to emphasize that the factors of advantage involved in memorizing are interest, attention and confidence, frequency of experience, meaning and organization of the subject-mat- ter. They should supplement repetition.

Registration and Fixation

In recording experiences or registering verbal material there are certainprinciples,whichmakeforbetterreproductionandlongerretention. The most prominent of them are: good physical health, freedom from fatigue and anxiety, interest and attention, vividness of impression, repetition, giving experiences and verbal material, rich meaning, spaced repetition and memorizing by the part or the whole method have already been dealt with.All that is attempted here is an emphasis on some classroom practice, which can help fixation.

Before undertaking to memorize, it is advisable to determine whether the material is to be learnt for permanent or limited recall. There should be a definite purpose in all learning and memorizing. Most students learn for a limited recall for the use at the examination. They put off the entire learning until the last day or hours just preceding the examination, but only to find that they have made a hopeless mess of it. The best method is to have spaced recitations of the material sometimes before the examination until it is well learnt, and then to have a final practice just before the examination. While learning for permanent use, the matter should be done for a long period and associations among the items to be learnt should be developed.

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It has already been emphasized that vivid impressions last longer but effort should be made to prevent trivial things from occupying too much attention.

Repetition, too, should be also be stressed. In class, every student should think of the answers to the questions asked of his classmates. If he knows the answer, he getting a review, if does not know, he will be able to learn when his classmate repeats the answer. Some students at colleges listen to the lecturer attentively and take down notes with the help of textbooks on coming home, others take down notes in the classroom and develop them at home with the help of a number of books.All these recommendations are helpful.

Somelearnersoutlinetheirreadingmatterandcountthesub-heading. Others learn the first letter or a word of every line of a poem. Others organize their matter into logical heads and learn the order of those heads.

From the teacher’s point of view of, the lesson to be learnt should haveamultiplesenseappeal.Inteachingnewwordstheteacherdoesnot only pronounce the word, but spells it, asks the class to pronounce and spell it, writes it on the blackboard and asks the class to transcribe it.After having seen it, read and written it, their impressions are visual, audi­ tory and muscular. The multiple sense appeal helps effective fixation.

James says, “all improvement of memory consists of the improvementofone’shabitualmethodofrecordingfacts.”Thesemethodscanbe mechanical as the intensification and repetition of the stimuli. They can be judicious as remembering things by arranging them logically, classifying and placing them under general heads.They can also be ingenious as remembering things by fancifully connecting them with other things.

Retention

As it was mentioned above, differences in retention are due to heredity. The ability to retain rests on traces left in the brain-paths, that is, on physiological factors, which are beyond our direct control.Anything that is retained in the mind persists in the form of dispositions. Individual differences in retention have already been described and the factors that influence it are age, fatigue, illness, poison and drugs that is, all that affects the health of the nervous system.

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Retention is very difficult to improve by practice. It is a case of disposition and the strength of disposition depends on an individual’s brain. The capacity of retention is native and cannot be improved by training.

Recall

Recall is the mental revival of the experience. Let us consider the following factors that influence the revival of the most pertinent memories.

The past is reproduced or recalled to adjust the present condition but often we cannot make the proper recall.

Recall is of two kinds — spontaneous and deliberate. For example, after-dinner hours we are generally filled up by such recollections ofoldpastexperiences,hopes,disappointments,joysandsorrows.One picture fades into another. This is spontaneous recall. From the ghost of memories that arise only a few are chosen to solve the problem or to make a proper adjustment. This is a deliberate recall.

To improve recall or reproduction the following suggestions are helpful:

•an attitude of confidence is essential to recall anxiety; fear or difference will prevent the recall. Those students who enter the examination hall in an attitude of excessive anxiety are sure to spoil their work. Doubt blocks reproduction;

•the stimulus should be given a good chance;

•if there is any difficulty in recall, drop the matter for the time being and come back to it afresh. Sometimes we are unable to solve a problem and give it up. Later when we try to tackle it, the solution flashes into consciousness readily. It does not good to keep doggedly hunting for a name you are not able to recall. Half an hour later it can enter your mind without the least trouble.

What Can a Teacher Do to Help Efficient Recall?

The first thing the teacher can do is to help students see meaning in what they are learning and find value in it for themselves and their problems. A student’s interest is the key to his learning. If the teacher

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can capture his interest he will work with persistence and imagination and learn with remarkable precision and detail. Students should be given a chance to share in the responsibility for their own learning. The teacher should not do all the planning, execution and evaluation; if he does so, learners can lose interest. Students’ participation in teaching and learning is helpful in building up their interest and in recalling what they learn.

Secondly, students should be helped to organize their learning so that they can find out what they have learnt and what they have left out. If they are continually helped to recall, draw inferences or establish relationships, they will be actively involved in the task of learning and will recall better.

Thirdly,multipleapproachesthroughgroupdiscussions,talksand writing will help fixation and recall.

Association of Ideas

Theassociationofideasisawell-knownprinciplebywhichoneidea calls up another or others that have been given previously experienced. Children are afraid when they spill milk; dogs run away when you raise your arm to strike. A particular sing awakens thoughts of the previous behavior, which is reproduced. It is a type of conditioned response.

Human experience is continuous and can be marked out into wholes. The thought of one fact or element of experience brings to mind others experienced along with it.

An association of ideas is governed by certain factors. It depends on frequency, intensity of experiences or on the mood or attitude of the person.

Different things can be associated so that recalling leads to the recall of the other in two factors. First of all, things can resemble each other. This is an association by similarity. Associations also depend on contiguity. Facts experienced or thoughts together are associated so that the thought of one leads to the other.

In teaching a language, words should be associated with actual things and experiences. If the two are presented together, the one will spontaneously recall the other.

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