Use a steady decline in improvement across exercises as a signal to lighten work or pause the exercises¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 4 claims (4 for) · 1 study (1 causal), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 4 claims rest on one study

Description¶

Winch proposes a pedagogical criterion based on his data: "Wherever, under first-rate teachers and with earnest work on the part of the children, a series of exercises begins to produce a steady decline in improvement, it is an indication to us of the advisability of lightening the general work or of a cessation of those exercises" until children's reparative activities have had time to act. The criterion rests on the finding that about one-third of the afternoon group's late work was futile.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• First-rate teachers and earnest work by the children
• A series of exercises with per-exercise improvement data to monitor

Constraints¶

• Derived from one class of 13-year-old boys performing mechanical memory tasks; the author notes boredom as a possible competing interpretation

Target Learners¶

• Day school children in a class or grade

Target Learning Goals¶

• Maintaining efficient schoolwork across the day and scheduling new subjects

Claims¶

• About one in seven boys in the afternoon group ceased to improve and tended downwards, compared with one in the morning group [+W]
• Improvement by practice continues in both morning and afternoon groups, but the morning group improves faster across weeks [+W]
• In one class of 13-year-old boys, memory scores were kept to a steady rank order by repeated practice (successive tests correlating +.87 to +.90) before fatigue testing began [+W]
• Late-afternoon memory work shows relative inefficiency of about 5-6 per cent compared with early-morning work in 13-year-old boys [+W]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Winch, W. H. (1912). Mental fatigue in day school children as measured by immediate memory: Part I. Journal of Educational Psychology, 3(1), 18–28. doi:10.1037/h0070728