RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31381, 29 May 1967, Page 24

RANDOM REMINDER

WELL, IT’S THIS WAY . . .

There must have been considerable sympathy for Dr. W. R. Holmes when he said, at a meeting of the Christchurch Regional Planning Authority, that he did not understand a somewhat obscure report which had something to do with regional planning. We are pleased to report that we are now in a position to Put Him Right. It happened quite by accident, and we make no particular claim to distinction about it. Fireside reading and reflection have given mankind many advances. It so happened there wasn’t a Mickey Spillane left unread, so we picked up a little thing by a gentleman called Herbert J. Klausmeter who appears to know about 550 pages worth of educational psychology. A lot of it is in small print. He has the answers for those who need instruction in reading re-

ports, or almost anything. Even as early as page 38,. one finds such diverting headings as “The Behavoural Continuum.” There wasn’t enough time to go into that But get a load of this . . . “Usually low and positive correlations are found between cognitive abilities and psychomotor abilities, between cognitive abilities and affective characteristics, and between psychomotor abilities and affective characteristics.” As recently as 1949, Harlow (page 353) postulated that learning to learn was a more important variable in most learning tasks than is making correct responses in the presence of certain stimuli. Food for thought there, for the authority. And then (page 370) there is further good advice: “Proactive rather than retroactive inhibition was found to be the determin-

ing factor in forgetting, and interpolated material, substantively similar to but not identical with the original learning did not result in retroactive inhibition but facilitated retention.” There’s lots more like that, and by the time you're through with it. a Regional Planning Authority report is child’s play. The whole thing was put (page 173) in a nutshell (in 1952) by two gentlemen with the delightfully quaint names of McGeoch and Irion. They said: ”... human beings learn meaningful material much more efficiently than nonmeaningful material and in educational settings the acquisition of meanings does and should take precedence over rote learning of words.” They probably said a lot more. too.

Elementary, my dear Dr. Holmes.