Developmental psychology.pdf

272 Learning and Information Processing
Sometimes a situation arises in which massed practice, despite its low efficiency,
is necessary. You can be ready for a Spanish exam in 10 hours if two-hour
sessions are used for five consecutive days, but the test is tomorrow and you study day
and night, perhaps for 15 hours. With this massed practice, the required studying time
is 50 percent greater. You are ready for the test on time, but learning by this means,
if not followed by further practice, is also more readily forgotten.
Importance of Effort Practice can be fatiguing and time-consuming. Would it not
be preferable to turn on a tape recorder and learn Spanish while asleep?
Several early studies indicated promising results, and the mass media quickly
publicized these claims. But later investigations showed an important shortcoming in
this work on sleep-learning: the sleepers were partially awakened by the recordings.
Studies designed to correct this defect involved recordings that remained on only when
electroencephalograms showed that the subjects were truly sleeping, as indicated by
various physiological measures. Under these conditions the learners showed no evidence
of learning while asleep (Emmons & Simon,. 1956).
Sleep surely will rise again as a research topic in learning, and it has been of
recent interest in Russia. Some studies there have suggested that sleep-learning is possible,
but close scrutiny of the data has indicated that the learning process is often
commenced prior to falling asleep. The phenomenon in question appears to be memory,
not learning per se, and earlier we saw that verbal learning is best retained when it is
followed by inactivity or sleep. There may even be some consolidation or improvement
of the memory trace during this period (Aarons, 1976).
One general conclusion from all of this research is that the outcome in learning
is typically proportional to the effort. Learning, especially complex learning, requires
concentration. For an objective in the cognitive domain, for example, the value
of recitation versus mere reading has been widely demonstrated. In these studies recitation
does not involve reading aloud but rather actively trying to recall what has been
read. In one instance, students memorized nonsense syllables and historical information
with varying amounts of time spent in each form of learning, including one group
that spent only 20 percent of time reading and 80 percent in recitation. The final outcome
was quite clear; the larger the proportion of time in recitation, the greater was
the learning (Gates, 1917).
The reasons for the advantages of recitation are fairly obvious. Reading with
the knowledge that one must soon recite usually raises motivation; recitation tells how
well one is progressing; and most important, the person who recites usually is preparing
to meet the objective. In learning the geography of southwest Spain, studying a normal
map would be far inferior to using this map and also an outline map with many details
missing. With both maps, learners can study and then intermittently test themselves
on the geographical features.
Dividing the Task The size of the task to be mastered is another persistent issue.
Would it be more efficient to learn this geography as a whole, or would it be best to
break it up into parts, approaching the problem regionally? This issue is called whole
versus part learning, and the findings are specific to the task. In other words, the results
found for one task may or may not apply to another task.
Since geography topics can be readily divided, the part approach would have
special merit for southwest Spain, but putting the parts together sometimes requires
much additional work. Language, for example, is often learned in parts, as one works
on vocabulary, the indirect object, then the subjunctive, and so forth, but speaking a
foreign language fluently is not so easy. In most cases it seems best to use a flexible
plan, starting with the whole but subdividing it as necessary, when difficult aspects
require special attention (Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954).