Arizona republican., 1921-11-13

board for use in all the Southern states.
 "A motion picture has been made of every major operation. We have films showing microscopic organisms and demonstrating physiological pro- cesses, as, for example, the circula- ton of blood. Then, of. course, they have it all over textbooks in teaching chemistry, biology and ther scientific subjects in the schools"
 The producer handed us his au- thority for this last statement-an article by H. G. Wells, in which he says:
 T ask for half dozen projectors or so in every school and for a well stocked storehouse of films. The pos abilities of certain branches of teach ing have been altogether revolution- ized by the cinematograph. In near ly every school nowadays you will find a lot of more or less worn and damaged scientific apparatus which is supposed to be used for demonstrat- ing the elementary facts of chemistry, physics and the like.
 Now that is the sort of thing which still goes on. But it ought to be entirely out of date. All that scientific bric-a- -brac in the cupboard had far better be thrown away. All the demonstration experiments that science teachers will require in the future can be performed once for all before a cinematograph. They can be done finally: they need never be done again. You can get the best and most dexterous teacher in the world-he can do what has been done with the best apparatus in the best light; anything that is very minute or subtle you can magnify or repeat from another point of view; anything that is intricate you can record with extreme slowness; you can show the facts a mile off or six inches off and all that your actual class teacher need do now Is to spend five minutes in getting out the film he wants. 10 minutes in reading over the corre- spending lecture notes, and then he can run the film. give the lesson, | question his class upon it. note what they miss and how they take 1t, run | the film again for a second scrutiny, and get out for the subsequent study
 of the class the ample supply of dia- grams and pictures needed to fix the | lesson. Can there be any comparison | between the educational efficiency of l the two methods?r
 MT. Wells seems to doubt it. Nev- ertheless, such a comparison was re- gently made in a Detroit school under | the direction of J. H. Wilson. super visor of visual education, with grati- | fying results. The subject chosen for 1 the experiment was an educational film explaining How We Hear" The children were separated into two 1 groups, one of which was to see the 1 film, and the other of which was to l receive an oral lesson in the same
 facts.
 The film was shown twice to the visual class in the astonishingly short
 space of 13 minutes. The oral lesson required 55 minutes. the teacher talk ing great pains to impress upon her | pupils the same information con- tained in the film. At the close of the lesson the two separate classes were | given a written examination on the subject Then the papers were col- lected and marked without respect to
 the type of lesson by the same teach CT. The average grade attained by
 the visual group in the first test was
 64.76 per cent as compared with 615
 per cent made by the oral group that is to say, the visual gain was 3.26 per cent
 A month later a second. or memory, | test was given on the same subject and this time the visual group aver aged 63.9 per cent-a gain of Al per cent over the 59.5 per cent average made by the oral pupils.
 While the percentage of gain in this | experiment might have been even | greater if the subject chosen had been "Hov We See" instead of How ] We Hear" it is large enough to be well worth while, especially when the
 saving of time is considered.