Each student should be introduced to new material at a level of difficulty commensurate with his poor und experience current attainments
In an attempt to apply the principles of programmed learning to the whole of a one-year course, The Psychology of Learning, I constructed an initial test to find out what the students knew about the subject already. They were all second-year students reading for honours degrees in the social sciences, and all had completed an introductory course in psychology the previous year.
An alphabetical list of the concepts to course was presented to each student, together with a sheet giving the names of associated psychologists also arranged in alphabetical order. The task was to match the names with the concepts and to write them in accordingly. Allowing one point for each correct match, a total score of 175 was possible. The average obtained by a class of thirty-three students was 24, and the individual scores ranged from 8 to 56 .
The test helped the student by being an introduction to the concepts and names to be covered by the course (whole view), and by giving some idea of how much was already known, it helped the teacher to ascertain the class's existing knowledge and to decide where each student should start with the material to be presented.
The answers to each item on the test were analysed to find the relative familiarity of each concept. Some were well-known to all members of the class and could be omitted, There seemed little need, for instance, t much more about Pavlov's salivating dogs and the concept of "conditioned response'. On the other hand, none of the students had heard of algorithms, while only half the class knew much about the law of effect.
In such diveres knowledge exists among university students taking a course revelant to their full-time degree studies, how much wider will be the gap between older students joining part-time adult classes on a variety of subjects Nothing is calculated to sap the confidence of beginner more than to join an introductory class where "no prior knowledge of the subject is necessary only to find that everyone else knows a great deal about the topic already. If the teacher allows the better- informed students to set the pace, the real beginner may be lost for ever not only from that class, but from all others in the future.