|
|
|
|
Thorndike, Edward L.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1946
A tribute to James Earl Russel by Edward L. Thorndike.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1940
The author discusses two particular problems—gifted children in small cities, and certain aspects of the etiology or causation of very superior minds.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1939
For many sorts of leadership the problems of selection, training, and life-work or career are hard, and the customary procedures of school and life are not very dependable. The author presents some of the facts, in reverse order, about actual life-work first, about training for it second, and about selection last.
Edward L. Thorndike, Irving Lorge & S. Karpin - 1937
The authors have made a count of all the words outside the first or most used 2500 of the Thorndike list of 20,000 found in a random sampling of a million words in the Encyclopedia Britannica, made up of fifty selections of 20,000 words each. They have recorded in the case of all such words beginning with A, B, C, J, K, L, M the number of selections or "sources" as they shall call them in which the word appears and the number of times it occurs in each.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1936
The author has made a count of the words outside the most widely used 2500 (the first 2500 of the Thorndike 20,000 Word List) in 120 samples, usually of 40,000 words from books recommended for supplementary reading by children in Grades 3 to 8 by Terman and Lima. 20,000 words were taken in books the total length of which was under 40,000.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1934
THE regular "Readers" used in Grades 4 to 9 should be more than collections of material suitable for the grade in question to read. They should also be instruments for such training in the appreciation of literature as is appropriate, or instruments for developing the ability to read by ingenious exercises to give mastery of important knowledge, habits, and skills, and to prevent practice in error. There might well be distinct instruments for these two aims. Series aiming to be a course in literature for Grades 4 to 9 are available, but a satisfactory series of exercises to give specific help in reading in these grades is yet to be devised.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1934
A discussion of means and methods to increase ability to read.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1931
I SHALL not take the reader's time with evidence that research has been of value in education. Probably no well-informed student of education has any doubt on the matter.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1927
This address by Professor Thorndike was one of a series given before the Staff of Teachers College in 1916.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1921
The task of education is to make changes in human beings. We teachers and learners will spend our time this year to make ourselves and others different, thinking and feeling and acting in new and better ways.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1921
Consider these simple questions: How many English words should the ordinary boy or girl know the meanings of at the end of Grade 8? Which words should all or nearly all pupils know at that stage? In what grades and in what connections should they be learned?
Stuart A. Courtis & Edward L. Thorndike - 1920
The score of an individual in a mental test is merely a partial record of what the individual did with the test material under the test conditions. No score indicates the totality of performance.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1918
The judgments of men with which we are concerned are judgments of the man's fitness for some defined purpose. Such are the judgments of a life insurance company of a man's fitness to be insured, or the judgments by an examining board of a boy's fitness for entrance to college, or the judgment by an employer of a man's fitness for a certain job, or the judgment by a recruiting officer of a man's fitness to be a soldier.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1916
The above article by Professor Thorndike is the fifth of a series of addresses given before the staff of Teachers College with the aim of studying the basic principles which must underlie a system of education suited to the needs of a democratic society such as ours.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1916
The technique of evaluating the difficulty of each question of each set is rather intricate. I shall not report here the detailed methods of each case, nor give the detailed calculations.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
TEACHERS’ ESTIMATES OF THE QUALITY OF SPECIMENS OF HANDWRITING It is the purpose of this number of the RECORD to provide teachers with means of making their “marks” or estimates or measurements of handwriting more accurate and more useful.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
PROBLEM V To measure the effect of the practice in judging the fifty specimens (5, 8, 9, 11, etc.) upon ability to estimate specimens of different size and of different style. To make the experiment of Problem IV still more instructive a teacher may measure his ability with another set of specimens of a different sort before and after the practice just described.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
PROBLEM I For a teacher to discover just how accurate his present unaided judgment of the quality of handwriting is. In order to enable a teacher to discover how good or bad his present judgment of handwriting is. I have arranged the following experiment.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
PROBLEM II For a teacher to see to what extent the use of a scale or system of standards improves his judgment of the quality of handwriting. Examine the Scale for Handwriting found in Supplement B. This scale is a series of specimens improving steadily in quality from 4 up to 18.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
PROBLEM III To compare one’s accuracy in using the Scale with that of competent teachers in general. Copy the entries of column 4 of Record Sheet A in column 2 of Record Sheet B (under the heading “Value (0-18) assigned by the aid of the Thorndike Scale before special practice”).
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
PROBLEM IV To improve one's precision in estimating the quality of specimens of handwriting. To improve the accuracy of our estimates of the quality of handwriting, we may use this same series of fifty specimens, (5, 8, 9, 11, 22............256) whose true values are known.1
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
To measure the quality of his handwriting precisely, there should be at least four specimens produced on four different days, each being judged by a different teacher or other competent person.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
The scale to be presented here is, I repeat, preliminary and provisional, but I shall for the present describe it and its use as if it were in final form, since reservations, criticisms, and the description of assumptions would only confuse the reader. Later, the nature, defects, and limitations of the scale will be stated frankly.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
THE ADMINISTRATION OF SCALE A FOR VISUAL VOCABULARY Scale A is designed for classes of grades 4 to 8, inclusive, but may be used in grade 3, and is useful in the high-school to some extent.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
LIMITATIONS AND DEFECTS OF SCALE A The insufficient precision of the scale has already been noted, and the remedy, its extension by the use of other words of equal difficulty for each line.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
SOME SPECIAL ADVANTAGES OF SCALE A The scale measures ability to understand printed words, unconfused with ability to express oneself orally or in writing. Checking by classes is in this respect far superior to any form of definition test.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
THE DERIVATION OF SCALE A The words of the scale were chosen from a much larger number which were given to about 2,500 pupils in grades 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, of five different schools, in the form of Tests I, II, III, and IV, shown below, in April, May and June.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
A SCALE FOR MEASURING THE UNDERSTANDING OF SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS Mere word knowledge is much less important than the ability to get the message carried by a continuous passage.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
SCALE ALPHA. FOR MEASURING THE UNDERSTANDING OF SENTENCES SET A OR 4 Read this and then write the answers. Read it again as often as you need to. John had two brothers who were both tall. Their names were Will and Fred. John's sister, who was short, was named Mary. John liked Fred better than either of the others. All of these children except Will had red hair. He had brown hair.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
LIMITATIONS TO SCALE ALPHA So far, except for a warning at the beginning of the section, Scale Alpha has been described as if the degrees of difficulty (4, 6, 8 and 10) were exact, and as if the different elements of each set were equally difficult to respond to correctly.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
THE EXTENSION AND IMPROVEMENT OF SCALE ALPHA Since many of those who read this report will wish to try not only Scale Alpha, but also other similar tests, in the case of the pupils of whom they have charge, I present here some of the tests which will probably help to extend the scale to greater difficulties, fill in intermediate sets, and add other elements equal in difficulty to those now given in a, b, c, and d....
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
A PROVISIONAL SCALE FOR MEASURING ABILITY TO PRONOUNCE ENGLISH SENTENCES During the year 1913-14, Mr. W. S. Gray made, with some help from the author, a preliminary study of tests of efficiency in oral reading. ...
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
THE GRAY TENTATIVE SCALE FOR MEASURING ACHIEVEMENT IN ORAL READING Passage a It was time for winter to come. The little birds had all gone far away. They were afraid of the cold. There was no green grass in the fields, and there were no pretty flowers in the gardens. Many of the trees had dropped all their leaves. Cold winter with its snow and ice was coming soon.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
It is the purpose of this number of the RECORD to report some of the results of work toward the construction of scales for the measurement of ability to read.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1914
MEANS OF IMPROVING THE SCALE The extension of Scale A to a ten-word scale is a matter of time and labor. By using a test identical with the scale except that many other words not in Tests I, II, III and IV are added (e.g., as boys' names....)
Edward L. Thorndike - 1913
An ideal scale or graded series of amounts of some one .quality allows easy and accurate comparison of anything to be measured with itself and consequent easy and accurate determination of the amount in the series which is the closest match to the thing to be measured.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1913
We measure a child's achievement in drawing by the drawings which he produces, in connection with the conditions under which he produces them. We measure his improvement by the differences between his earlier and his later products.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1913
A scale for the merit of drawings by pupils 8 to 15 years old.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1913
The most useful definition of zero, or ' just not any,' merit in the drawing of a child 8 to 15 is a drawing which is a draw ing—not a scratch, a writing, a daub or a mere random product of muscular activity,—but which has just not any merit as a representation of its intended object, as a statement of its in tended fact, or as a thing of beauty—which fails to portray or inform or please.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1913
The scale will be of service wherever the merit of the drawings of any child or group of children is to be compared with the merit of the drawings of any other child or group of children or with the drawings of the same child or group of children under other conditions.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1913
A somewhat elaborate preliminary study of forty-five drawings, mostly chosen from Kerschensteiner's Die Entwickelung der zeichnerKchen Begabung,i resulted in the rough choice as a graded series from zero up, of the fourteen drawings of Figs. 6-19, and one other (c1), shown here in Fig. 20. These fifteen drawings were then submitted to artists, teachers of art,ii and students of education and psychology, with the following instructions.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1913
I add some fifty drawings which, together with those appearing in the text but not used in the scale itself, will be of service in testing the competence of teachers to measure the quality of drawings.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
Handwriting may profitably be studied from three points of view: —that of the physiology and psychology of movement,i that of the part it may play in the intelligently directed activities of child life in schools,ii and that of the direct examination of the quality and speed of handwriting secured by various forms of school training. But to any study of it there is one very desirable preliminary — some means of measuring the quality of a sample of handwriting.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
Pages 11 to 37 contain or rather are the scale for merit of the handwriting of children of grades 5 to 8. It is not a scale of merit of the writings of children of grades I to 4 or of the writings of boys and girls of the high-school age. It can, however, be more or less well used for such cases until we get more appropriate scales. Each set of samples represents a point on this scale. The samples on page n are of quality 18 and 17; the samples on page 13 are of quality 16; the samples on pages 15 and 17 are of quality 15; and so on.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
The scale has, as previously noted, some defects. First of all, not all styles of writing are represented on the scale, much less at each point of quality on it. For example, we have no pronounced backhand writings of certain qualities and no very pronounced forward slant of certain qualities.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
The topic of this section is fitly treated in the one statement: Any measurement of the Quality of handwriting may be made more accurately and conveniently with the scale, either actually present or held in memory, than without it. The reader may apply this statement to whatever cases his interests suggest. I shall mention a few of the commoner uses and explain the function of the scale as a standard held in memory.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
The scale for adult women's handwriting consists of only six points, each represented by only one sample. Let us call these samples a, b, c, d, e, and f. They represent the best selection that I could make of writings ranging from nearly the best to nearly the worst of the ordinary writing of some five 'hundred women teachers and students and differing progressively by equal degrees of merit. The derivation of the scale was as follows:
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
The conclusions to be reported in sections 8 to 13 are based upon about 3000 samples of handwriting made in a formal test conducted by Dr. C. W. Stonei in seven school systems, five public and two private. These samples were scored in about 700 cases by six judges using no scale, and in the remaining cases by two judges using an early form of the scale.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
We have seen that the school systems, with the exception of F, differ little among themselves in the efficiency of the handwriting which they secure. Individual pupils on the contrary do differ greatly. Excluding system F, we still find amongst eighth-grade pupils a range from a pupil writing only 55 letters per minute at quality 7.5 up to a pupil writing 79 letters per minute at quality 15.2. Of the 15 eighth-grade pupils writing at the same rate (53 words in 4 minutes) the scores for quality (excluding system F) run from 9.1 to 14.6.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
Rapidity is in and of itself a good sign. If we know nothing about one score or so of pupils save that they are rapid writers and nothing about another score save that they are slow writers, we can prophesy that at the same rate the former group will on the average do writing of a higher quality.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
Amongst school children there is a close relation between the quality of writing at a natural rate and that at a slower rate. For instance, let us take the 26 children in grades 6 and 7 of one school of system F, who wrote at a rate of 33-37 inclusive in the first test and at a rate of 52-60 inclusive in the second and ask whether high rank for quality of writing at a slow rate involves high rank for quality of writing at a speed some 60 per cent, greater.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
The Effect of Reduction from a Pupil's Natural Rate upon the Quality of his Handwriting The gain in quality which a pupil secures by writing more slowly than his natural rate is not great. Sixty-one pupils whose natural rate was from 52 to 58 words in four minutes, by reducing their speed to 32 to 36 words in four minutes, that is, by writing only two thirds as fast, gained on the average in quality less than one step of the scale.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
If one selects from children's written work 1000 samples ranging from the best to the worst handwriting found in grades 5 to 8 and tries to rank these 1000 samples in order of merit for handwriting, one finds that he cannot make 1000 such ranks. Some of the handwritings will be indistinguishable in "goodness" or "quality" or "merit." Nor can one make 100 such ranks. Nor can one make 40.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
Certain partial descriptions of the means and methods by which the children's scale and adult women's scale were derived have been given in sections 2 and 6(1). A full account of the derivation of either is inadvisable both because it would necessarily be extremely long and because much of the work clone was such as I now know, from the very experience of doing it and seeing its results, to have been unnecessary.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1910
Not much can be proved by relating these differences to differences in means and methods of teaching handwriting, since the number of school systems studied is so few. F, which is so markedly superior, uses vertical writing of a special system arranged by the supervisor of handwriting, uses writing books, devotes 75 minutes weekly to specific instruction and practice in writing in grades 5, 6, and 7 (of what is done up to grade 5, I have no report), and 30 minutes weekly in grade 8. The teachers in general follow the same system in writing on the blackboard.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1905
Sooner or later we shall learn what training is desirable for teachers by experimenting with various courses and keeping track of the results. Our present hit-or-miss methods of following individual opinions or traditional practices will give way to the rational selection of the proved best.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1901
The general outline of the work is as follows: I. A general account of the physical and mental life of children. First half year. II. (a) The psychology of children of the kindergarten age or (b) the psychology of adolescence. Three weeks of second half year.
Edward L. Thorndike & Clark Wissler - 1901
It is easy to see that reading good literature improves the minds and morals of boys and girls, but it is hard to see just how. It is also easy to see that literary, in the sense of artistic, presentation of facts has a vastly different effect on boys and girls from that of the mere recital of the same facts or their actual experience, but nothing in human nature is harder to give an accurate account of than just what this effect is.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1901
The purpose of this number of the RECORD is to give an account of the work done by the department of psychology in Teachers College, and to present some of the more important data of Child Study in a form accessible to all students of children and convenient for teachers of special subjects.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1901
Teachers College provides three courses for those who wish to study the mental development of children.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1901
The work in Psychology 11 consists of lectures, required readings and individual reports.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1901
The relation of the work in psychology to the administration of the Horace Mann and Experimental Schools.
Edward L. Thorndike & Clark Wissler - 1901
One of the most directly useful forms of child study is the attempt to get a rational account of the way the different school subjects influence children's minds. This sort of child study has been in progress ever since there were intelligent teachers, and we find substantial agreement on many important points.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1901
The purpose of this number of the RECORD is to give an account of the required courses in pure and applied psychology at the Teachers College. It comprises syllabi of two courses, the Elements of Psychology and the Applications of Psychology in Teaching.
Edward L. Thorndike - 1901
Psychology A is a course in the scientific study of human nature and intelligence. It aims to preserve such breadth and rigor of treatment as fits a course for an academic degree and still to meet the peculiar wants of the prospective teacher.
|
|
|
|
   |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||
