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an argument in favor of late night study, and perhaps also in favor of "cramming" before examinations. A. E. Wagner conducted one of the early experiments "to determine the number of repetitions necessary to memorize and retain with maximum certainty a miscellaneous collection of facts." He noted the effectiveness of Jesuit methods of thorough and repeated drill and was thus inspired to study the value of frequent repetition. He concluded that it was best to employ a relatively small number of repetitions with a constantly increasing interval of time between the repetitions, continuing over a rather long time period. His results showed that high school students, on the average, needed six repetitions (of his selected miscellaneous facts), and grade school students averaged about seven repetitions. The physiological explanation of memory generally accepted today is that everything we experience or learn produces some physical change in the brain, leaves some kind of a trace, sometimes called an engram.* Weinland suggests that the memory trace may be a lowering of the resistance to passage of the nervous impulse from one cell to another, so that the next impulse passes across more easily. We have already discussed Thorndike's laws of learning, which state the importance of motivation, repetition, reward and meaningfulness; and the Gestalt emphasis on the whole, the meaningful configuration (Weinland |
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