School and the information explosion

Yuri Babansky

School and the information explosion

In the past few decades the volume of scientific information has doubled every eight to ten years. The explosion caused by this growth entails certain changes in scientific activities and in the methods of dealing with the new information and mastering it. Many countries have set up scientific information centres to accumulate, classify and process information for circulation among consumers. There is a rapidly expanding network of terminals in libraries and scientific institutions, which are connected with storage banks for the respective fields.

The information explosion has influenced the nature of education: the content of curricula, textbooks, teaching aids and teaching methods in present-day schools. Some writers have predicted that schools will simply 'die out', while others, on the contrary, have demanded that teaching be greatly intensified to catch up with the rapidly changing information, that the number of years of schooling be extended, that teaching be completely automatized, etc.

Soviet didactics, rejecting both these extremes, undertook a systematic solution of the new problem. First and foremost, Soviet teachers were determined to improve the content of the curricula and textbooks so as to ensure that they more fully reflect modern tendencies of development in all fields of scientific knowledge and that they give schoolchildren a better, more complete and up-to-date idea of new scientific information. All curricula were modernized to include the latest achievements, yet to remain understandable to the average schoolchild.

The following criteria were applied: An integral solution to the task of shaping a comprehensively

developed personality. The authors of the various curricula strove to include all the theories, laws and concepts that give an integral

I38

Yuri Babansky (ryssR). Vice-President of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and Professor of educational sciences. Author of more than 20o works on theoretical aspects of education, in particular monographs on perfecting the contemporary school, which have been translated into several languages.

Prospects, Vol. XI0 No. z, I98i


idea of one or another specific branch of knowledge; the most characteristic applications this field has in industry, social and cultural life; and the principal forms of activity that serve to develop in schoolchildren the habit of working independently and to develop their cognitive interests, will power and emotions. Then it was necessary to earmark, from this sufficiently full and integral content of the teaching in the specific discipline, its most important and significant elements.

Theoretical and practical significance of the content. The application of this criterion presupposes that, through comparative appraisal, only the most universal and informative elements of scientific knowledge are retained in the curricula, those that are absolutely necessary to elucidate the essence of the theories, laws and basic concepts that are generally recognized in that specific branch. This knowledge is widely used in practice, is of great interdisciplinary significance, and will be important for further education in higher schools.

The conformity of content complexity to the learning abilities of schoolchildren of a given age. These methods were employed: special tests, analysis of the results of admission examinations to higher schools, physiological laboratory tests to show that schoolchildren are not too exhausted after completely and comprehensively mastering a definite subject in a given period of time.

Conformity of the content of a discipline to the time allotted for teaching. The principal methods used when this criterion was put into practice were laboratory tests, in the course of which the time necessary for the full and comprehensive mastery of a given material was docked; tests given in class, with a precise timing of how long it took each pupil to fulfil the given assignment; and help for the weakest of them. As a result of the application of this criterion, some less important items, reference data, facts, etc., were taken out of the first version of the curricula.

International practice. In accordance with this criterion, our curricula and textbooks were compared to foreign ones. We compared the schemes taught, the theories, laws and concepts they embraced, how profoundly they were elucidated, the scope of habits and skills formed, the list of general educational habits, the time allotted for each theme, etc. As a result, corrections were made in the curricula and textbooks whenever necessary, with due attention to the practice of teaching one or another discipline in foreign schools.

x39

Yuri Babansku

The conformity of the content of educational work to the material base of the modern school. When putt ing this criterion into practice, the first thing done was to draw up a list of all the laboratory and training assignments given. As additional laboratory possibilities appear, this list is revised and made more up to date. Assign- ments involving the use of obsolete equipment are excluded from the curricula and textbooks, In some cases assignments are likewise excluded from the curricula if the equipment they require has not yet become available for all study-rooms. Such assignments are included in optional lessons of the respective disciplines, with a view to making them obligatory for all schools as soon as the material base of every school's study-rooms becomes sufficiently developed.

The Soviet school is now giving a great deal more attention to instill- ing in children the skills and habits to learn independently. Of these numerous skills and habits research has picked out the most important: the ability to plan one's activities, to determine the fundamental and most significant aspects of the material learned, to quickly find one's bearings in books and other sources of information, to read, write and calculate quickly, to master self-control in one's educational operations, etc. The requirements for developing these skills and habits are incorporated into the new standard curricula for secondary schools. To develop them various methods and ways of teaching are employed.

Schoolchildren are taught to plan their studies with due attention to the specific features of each subject. For instance, a teacher of literature teaches his pupils to plan their composition, the retelling of the plot and the characterization of the literary image; a teacher of physics tells how to plan and solve a physics problem, how to carry out a laboratory assignment; a geography teacher, how to draw up the characteristics of a natural or economic zone; a Russian teacher, how to analyse a sentence, a word, etc. The teachers' experience shows that an efficient method of forming the ability of planning a schoolchild's learning activities is to systematically give a home assignment to plan his or her future class report and then make use of this plan when actually making the report.

Forming the habit of planning is closely linked with developing the ability to pick out the main and most significant points in a text. To achieve this the teacher makes use of the following methods: he tells the pupils the tasks and the plan of the theme to be studied; draws their attention to the principal questions in the theme, to the main concepts, facts and conclusions, stressing especially the funda-

I4o


mental points of each concept; makes brief notes and sketches on the blackboard and recommends that the children do the same in their notebooks.

When the children are engaged in independent work in class, the teachers systematically give them special assignments, such as finding the main idea in the text you have just read, choosing titles for the various parts of the material given in the textbook, expressing the main idea of the text in one sentence, summing up the text, generalizing the different facts you have learnt in the lesson and drawing a conclusion, giving a brief summary of the main ideas of the text, composing test questions for a text, etc.

All definitions, conclusions and summaries in textbooks are set in bold-face type; most texts are followed by test questions and sum- marized tables; sketches and diagrams are given to help form the ability of picking out the principal and most significant points.

In school great attention is devoted to forming the ability and habit of working with textbooks and reference books. Schoolchildren are taught to find the necessary text by using the table of contents; to be able to read tables, sketches, working drawings and diagrams; to draw up the thesis to, or a synopsis of, a text they have read; to find the necessary book by using a library catalogue; to make up a bibliographical list of the material used to prepare a report, and so on. Talks are given on the most rational ways of making up one's own collection of books. Ever more frequently now teachers inform the children of the planned radio and television broadcasts intended to help them develop their habits for independently augmenting their knowledge. They are taught to make use of slides, film strips and microfilms, as well as films, sound and video-recordings, and the simplest teaching and consultation machines.

Of special importance in the information explosion is the development of the speed of the learning and cognition process. The schoolchildren must read, write and calculate at the optimum speed for their age-group. For instance, in the fourth and fifth grades a pupil must be able to read I2O to 15o words a minute. The development of the speed of reading is important not only for accelerating the process of assimilating information but also for being able to pick out the main ideas of a text. If a schoolchild reads too slowly, he or she cannot make a rapid comparison of the significance of the different elements of the text, while at an optimum rate of reading he or she can do this quite successfully, and fully understand the meaning of everything read.

141

Yuri Babansky

Various activkies meant to develop the speed of the learning process are employed, for example, in many schools in Kharkov, under the guidance of Professor I. T. Fedorenko. There the pupils know the rates of reading for each grade well. The teachers teach the lower graders to rid themselves when reading of the recurrent eye movements, not to move their lips, not to try to pronounce the words aloud but to read more to themselves, and to do breathing exercises before starting to read. They teach the children not to take in separate letters but whole words and phrases, to develop peripheral eyesight, to expand their field of reading by trying to read a page diagonally, to try to anticipate the words to come on the basis of the content of what they have already read. Reading speed is set there for a week, and the fulfilment of the assignment is spot- checked; exercises are given in reading a text in a pre-set time.

To speed up the rate of writing, teachers explain the importance of speed writing to the children, which helps one follow the main idea wkhout concentrating on the actual tracing of each letter, then give them exercises speciaU~y designed for quick writing. In the arts and crafts lessons in lower grades the children make use of plastic moulding to develop their finger muscles, in physical-education lessons they are given exercises for developing their wrists. Home- work assignments include copying a text and recording the time needed to do it. At the end of each term the speed of writing is measured and set down in a special table, which is then shown both to the lower graders and to their parents. All these methods of work are of considerable help in speeding up the process of the schoolchildren's assimilation of educational information, and in preparing them to quickly find their bearings in its swift flow.

So that the accelerated rate of work does not lower its quality, schools devote a good deal of attention to developing the habit of self-control in the study process, parallel to speeding up reading and writing. This habit is formed by the teachers of all the different subjects, with due attention to the specific content of each subject. A physics teacher teaches the children how to check whether or not a physics problem has been solved correctly by doing some preliminary operations with the resulting formula or by appraising the practical plausibility of the result derived. A mathematics teacher instils the habit of checking calculations by reverse operations. Teachers in the humanities train their pupils to work with the test questions in the textbook. When assigning homework, they advise them to check how well they have learnt the lesson by retelling it, etc.

z42


Methods of appraising the knowledge, skills and habits of the schoolchildren, as well as checking their preparedness, are also being improved. Thus, during examinations and tests in secondary schools much more attention is being paid to checking on the child's ability to use a book, reference materials, an encyclopedia and other such books brought out specially for schoolchildren by the Prosveshcheniye and Pedagogika Publishing Houses. For instance, in recent years the multivolume Children's Encyclopaedia has been published, as well as a two-volume encyclopedia for lower graders (called What Is It? Who Is It?), dictionaries for young physicists, young athletes, and several others. At examinations schoolchildren are allowed to make use of certain reference books, specially designed for checking their ability to find their way quickly in information sources. The stress is ever more often being laid not on checking a knowledge of facts, figures, etc., but on discovering how well the material taught has been understood, how well the child can establish the reasons and consequences of phenomena and their interconnecfions, how well he can reason in support of his statements and conclusions.

Another significant line in improving teaching methods in the information explosion is the theory and methods of teaching- optimization developed in Soviet pedagogics, i.e. the choice of methods of teaching that permit achieving a greater educational result in a pre-set time and with the least outlay of effort on the part of both teachers and pupils. The theory of teaching-optimization takes up as one single whole the problem of raising the efficiency of teaching and that of preventing teachers' and pupils' overwork. This is its basic difference from all the theories of a one-sided intensifi- cation of teaching, so widespread now in pedagogics abroad. The theory of optimization proceeds from the fact that each method of teaching can successfully solve some educational problems, others less successfully, and still others altogether poorly. That is why it is necessary to know quite well the comparative possibilities of all the methods and, depending on the educational tasks set, to make use, in a given situation, of those that can most successfully cope with the given task for this particular lesson. Table I gives an approximate comparison of the possibilities of some teaching methods.

If, for instance, at a given stage of the lesson the main task is to get the class to acquire theoretical knowledge of average difficulty, the teacher should choose a combination of verbal and problem-and-quest methods, as the table shows that they solve the problem most successfully of all. I f the content of the theme being studied permits

I43

Yuri Babansky

TABLE I . C o m p a r i s o n o f t e a c h i n g m e t h o d s

Some major educat ional problems solved in the process of teaching

F o r m i n g Deve lop ing

I V e r b a l -{- -{- -{- -t- - - -f- -k - - - - -b V i s u a l - - + ~ - - -b + ~ + -k

P P r a c t i c a l - - -b Jr -t- - - -t- -t- -t- -{-

I I R e p r o d u c - t ive + + + + + + + + - - + + + P r o b l e m - a n d -

q u e s t ~- ~- ~- - - -t- ~- - - -~ �9 -b ~- ~-

- b +

a maximum solution of the problem of developing the children's independence in acquiring knowledge, the most rational choice would be a combination of problem-and-quest methods with practical assignments to write, solve mathematical problems, etc. This choice is by no means a matter of chance; it proceeds from a comparative appraisal of the possibilities of various methods of developing the schoolchildren's independent thinking. Methods of teaching are chosen in the same way when other educational problems are set as well. The principal thing here is not merely to apply the table, but to make a knowing choice of the best methods--those that will help to optimize the educational process.

Among the interesting pedagogical experiments carried out in the Soviet Union aimed at accelerating learning are, for instance, the works of Professor P. M. Erdniyev. He strives to find ways of teaching children to memorize information in larger units. He conducts lessons in the experimental school of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, using textbooks he himself wrote.

Professor Erdniyev considers that the simultaneous study of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, of a theorem and its inverse, of integration and differentiation, etc., makes the pupils' learning activities much more energetic and the process of assimilating knowledge much more profound. Experiments in this

i44


direction are continuing, and the future will show whether they should really be widely used in school practice.

Such prominent psychologists as Professors D. B. Elkonin and V. V. Davydov are experimenting to prove that the role of general- ization and the deductive approach can be enhanced at the initial stage of education. According to them, the early development of theoretical thought can heighten the effectiveness of the educational process. Many teachers in various subiects in the senior classes of secondary schools are engaged in similar quests to enhance the role of deductive methods of teaching. For example, electrical phenomena are now being studied not inductively but on the basis of the theory of electronics, and so on. Such methods permit one to assimilate a larger volume of information in less time.

A good method of accelerating the learning process is to teach schoolchildren a unified approach to the solution of problems of one definite type. In the information explosion, the expansion of this method of teaching will help train children to find their bearings in the torrent of scientific information much more easily, and to be able to solve the scientific and practical problems that they come up against.

The information explosion has obliged schools to take up the problem of interdisciplinarity in a much more concrete way. The curricula of all grades in secondary schools, introduced in the I98o/8x academic year, now include the section 'inter-discipline connections', which points out what previously learnt knowledge the teacher can rely on, and which questions he should avoid duplicating.

Measures are also being taken to do away with excessive concentration in the study of some disciplines, especially chemistry, physics, biology and several others. This, too~ creates time reserves for learning new concepts, facts and other information.

A long-term experiment is being conducted in elementary schools in the stage-by-stage mastering of knowledge and skills by the lower graders and in employing programmed teaching. Active control of the process of learning new material, a gradual transition from direct manipulations with obiects to inner speech and active thinking, according to the authors of the theory, accelerates the process of taking in knowledge and makes it much more effective.

Wide use is made in the Soviet Union of the elements of problem teaching, which permit schoolchildren to look into and gain an under- standing of simple problem situations, to suggest their ideas of the

145

Yuri Babansky

reasons for one or another phenomenon, to offer proofs and thus to advance in the assimilation of new educational materials. Recently, specialists in the field of problem teaching (Professor T. I. Makhmutov and others) have been striving to set the limits of the effective use of this method of teaching, and to determine the best conditions for using it in various age-groups or subjects.

Experiments are continuing in the use of suggestion in teaching foreign languages. However, final conclusions on whether or not it is rational to employ this method in the mass general schools have not yet been reached.

Great attention in Soviet pedagogical psychology is devoted to working out various methods for stimulating and motivating learning. Ever more stress is laid on the use of educational cognitive games, on educational discussions, on creating situations involving moral and emotional experiences, on situations diverting and entertaining the children, etc. Positive motives for learning help one to take in educational information more rapidly and get much less tired in doing so.

The weaker pupils find themselves in special difficulties because of the information explosion. Tests of the speed of reading, writing and calculations, which we conducted in the fourth to the sixth grades in the I96os, for instance, showed that it takes the weaker pupils an average of over six minutes to recopy a text of fifty words, while average ones do so in four minutes. The reading and calculating speed of the latter is almost double that of the former. Besides, the weaker pupils make almost three times the number of mistakes when copying, and twice as many in reading and calculations. That is why a group of Soviet psychologists has made a study of the psychological problems of poor progress among schoolchildren. The results they have devised help to differentiate the processes of teaching and thereby to provide the normal assimilation of educational information by all schoolchildren.

Soviet teachers and psychologists are searching for the best ways to rationalize the methods of controlling the teaching process. In the Georgian SSR an experiment has been under way for several years now on teaching children in elementary school without any marks whatsoever. The authors of the experiment proceed from the fact that what is most important in an elementary school is to create positive stimuli for learning, to reduce the negative effects of the tense state schoolchildren are inevitably in when they are being given marks. The main stress in the course of the experiment is laid

z46


on analysing the quality of the children's work, on revealing typical mistakes and difficulties and finding a way to eliminate them, not on giving the pupils a definite mark.

Another thing that has helped to improve teaching is the learning- teaching set in every discipline for both teachers and pupils, which includes a group of textbooks in the given discipline, methodical aids for the teacher, visual aids, teaching material handed out to the pupils, printed texts of problems, laboratory assignments, and cards with questions of varying degrees of complexity. All this permits a differentiation of the teaching processes and an accelerated assimilation by all pupils of new knowledge and skills.

A specific approach to preparing visual aids for the teaching process has become very important during the information explosion. Especially significant now are aids of a systematizing, classifying and generalizing nature, which help not only to see facts~ examples and illustrations but to line them up in a definite system and thus to perceive the internal links that exist between them.

Great hopes are placed in technical aids. Films and diagrams under- line the fundamental points in the teaching material, focus attention on them, and systematize, classify and generalize the information given instead of merely adding one fact after another to it. Study- rooms equipped with linguaphones, used in the study of languages, help assimilate more information in less time. Overhead projectors save time, for they permit teachers to lay one code card over another, thus demonstrating the dynamics of the development of a complex drawing, and to use coloured illustrations that activize the process of information assimilation.

A new form of educational film is devoted to teaching schoolchildren how to work with a textbook, with books written by prominent scientists and political figures.

Teaching practice has shown that the use of technical aids without a careful choice in each case often leads to a waste of time and the slowing up of the teaching process. To eliminate these defects in the use of technical teaching aids, a group of specialists from the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences has worked out special methodical cards that help choose the most rational technical means for the specific lesson. More and more attention now is given to making not full-length but short educational films, film fragments that become an integral part of the lesson. Ever more widely used now are minicomputers, especially for calculations during practical training in physics, chemistry, mechanical drawing, handiwork and

z47

Yuri Babansky

other disciplines. In mathematics, special attention is given to achieving an optimum blend of the use of technical aids while teaching the pupils the basic skills and habits of calculating.

An achievement in the Soviet school system in the past decade has been the mass switchover to the study-room system of teaching. Special study-rooms equipped with all the necessary technical means and methodical aids have been set up in most schools. These study- rooms facilitate the use of teaching aids in the course of the lesson, help save the teacher's time and the effort spent on carrying the necessary equipment from one class to another, and permit him or her to make use of more complex instruments and equipment.

A brief summary of the main activities would include the following: Perfecting the content by more careful selection. Emphasis on giving schoolchildren not only knowledge but also the

general ability to learn. Developing the theory and method for choosing the best combination

of teaching methods, for maximum possible results in given conditions.

Developing better methods of teaching children to memorize the information given them in larger units.

Heightening the role of interdisciplinary links in teaching, eliminating excessive concentration in studying individual disciplines.

Increasing the role of theoretical generalizations in elementary schools, making wider use of the deductive approach in assimilating knowledge.

Teaching schoolchildren a unified approach to the solution of problems of one type.

Making use, in junior forms, of elements of controlling the process of assimilating knowledge, on the basis of the theory of stage- by-stage shaping of thinking activities.

Making wider use of problem and discovery methods of teaching. Making use of varied teaching methods to stimulate and motivate

learning. Heightening the role of a differentiated approach to pupils, to prevent

poor progress in learning. Making optimum use in the teaching process of technical and visual

aids. Introducing into school practice teaching and learning sets and

study-room teaching.

148

Documents

School and the information explosion