QUESTIONS

1.  How do children (and adults) most frequently solve their problems?

2.  Under what conditions do children think and yet reach wrong conclusions?  Give examples.

3.  Can first-grade children think?  Give examples which prove your contention.

4.  What are the important elements to be found in all thinking?

5.  Show how these elements may be involved in a first-grade lesson in nature study.  In an eighth-grade lesson in geography.  In the teaching of any high school subject.

6.  When may habit formation involve thinking?  Memorization?

7.  Give five examples of problems which you believe will challenge the brightest pupils in your class.  Which would seem real and worth solving to the duller members of the group?

8.  How may the analysis of such ideas as come to mind, and the abstraction of the part which is valuable for the solution of a particular problem, be facilitated?

9.  How do you distinguish between thinking and reasoning?

10.  What are the essential elements in reasoning?  Give an example of reasoning as carried on by one solving a problem in arithmetic or geometry, in geography, physics, or chemistry.

11.  In what respects are the processes of induction and deduction alike?  In what do they differ?

12.  At what stage of the inductive process is deduction involved?

13.  Give examples of reasoning demanded in school work in which the process is predominantly inductive.  Deductive.

14.  Why are the statements “Induction proceeds from particulars to generals” and “Deduction from generals to particulars” inadequate to describe either process?

15.  In what sense is thinking dependent upon the operation of the laws of habit?

16.  To what degree is it possible to teach your pupils to think?  Under what limitations do you work?

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VIII.  APPRECIATION, AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT IN EDUCATION

Appreciation belongs to the general field of feeling rather than that of knowing.  The element which distinguishes appreciation from memory or imagination or perception is an affective one.  Any one of these mental states may be present without the state being an appreciative one.  But appreciation does not occur by itself as an elementary state, it is rather a complex—­a feeling tone accompanying a mental state or process and coloring it.  In other words, appreciation involves the presence of some intellectual states, but its addition makes the total complex of an emotional rather than a cognitive nature.  The difficulty found in discussing emotions in general, that of defining or describing them in language, which is a tool of the intellect, is felt here.  The only way to know what appreciation means is to appreciate.  No phase of feeling can be adequately described—­its essence is then lost—­it must be felt.  Nevertheless something may be done to differentiate this type of feeling from others.