A Pilot Experiment to Test the Relative Effectiveness of Three Kinds of Teaching Method and Gropings for a Design of Objective Tests of the Effectiveness of Teaching Methods

Two papers on teaching methods are presented. The first concerns an experiment that tested the relative effectiveness of three teaching methods: an uninterrupted lecture, a tape-recording, and reading a prescribed text. The three-way research design used the three teaching methods, three groups of six student teachers of physical medicine between the ages of 24 and 42, and three psychological topics as subject matter. Each teaching method was followed at once by a multiple choice test designed to measure eight cognitive levels from Bloom's "Cognitive Taxonomy of Educational Objectives." These levels of thinking are: terminology, facts, generalizations, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. A discussion of these concepts, testing conditions, and results of the pilot experiment is provided. The second baper concerns objective tests of the effectiveness of teaching methods in higher education. The correspondence between logical processes in the student's mind and categories of Bloom's "Cognitive Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" are expressed in terms of propositional, or truth functional, logic. The analysis concerns testing: a student's knowledge of fact presented during instruction, knowledge of presented relations betweeen facts, unpresented relations between presented facts, the ability to apply presented principles and generalizations, the ability to analyze unstated generalizations, unpresented relations between presented facts, the ability to evaluate, and value judgments. (SW)