Education and Psychology Series Volume 1 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SEQUENCE OF TOPICS IN ELEMENTARY TEXTBOOKS. The preceding discussion indicates that the field of psychology is in a state of specialization amounting almost to disintegration. There is wide disagreement in definition, treatment, and aim of psychology. In many of its phases lack of uniformity is glaringly evident, and it is from this standpoint that psychology has often been attacked both from within and from without. While making the analysis of texts, which will be taken up in the last chapter, the attention of the writer was attracted to a study of the sequence of topics in the general psychology textbooks most used at present in the United States. Interest in this connection was stimulated by an article by L. W. Sackett of the University of Texas, in which he asserts that "the most obvious part in the modern teaching of psychology noticeable even to the casual observer is the variation in the sequence of topics presented. There is little uniformity of sequence, writers or teachers choosing their own arrangement to suit tho'v own private purpose, or, seemingly, with no clear purpose at all." (1) Starting with this observation, Sackett chose an arbitrary arrangement of topics, and in comparison with it tabulated the order in which the same topics appeared in eleven different textbooks. The texts used were thos of James, Calkins, Angell, Judd, Pillsbury, Titchener- Primer and Text, Thorndike, Ebbinghaus, Bolton, and Halleck. The results of this comparison appear in Table I. Then fearing that the arbitary order of topics had in s: me way prejudiced the variation, he compared the order of the eleven texts, using James' Briefer Course as the standard. The results of this appear in Table II. JiaSc.o enTH30 1? 1ot-cXtsXX7-1 71HCMi-j IliMc:c-oooc-.0OCOe-OS i0 "T uo|i...