International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

THE CINEMA IN TEACHING THE SOUND AND TALKING FILM IN TEACHING (Editor's Note). Our contributor, Mr. F. L. DEVEREUX, Vice-President of Erpi Picture Consultants, the organisation attached to Electrical Research Products of New York, has sent us some reports drawn up by American teachers on the possibility of utilizing the sound and talking film in teaching, which complete the subject under examination m all its essential aspects. A brief sketch of the reports will give an idea of the way that didactic methodology is proceeding on the other side of the ocean in regard to the solution of the most important problems connected with a more extensive use of visual auxiliaries. The researches, to which these reports refer are the direct result of a series of previous studies made by American teachers. One of them, Mr. N. L. Engelhardt, teacher at the Teachers' College of Columbia University, points out that special mention is due to one of the pioneers m this sector, Professor Freeman, who, in an article published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1932 on Research vs. Propaganda in Visual Education, strongly advocated the necessity of making minute research into the use of all visual auxiliaries with the object of discovering by practical experiment the rational way of using such auxiliaries and thus avoiding any possibility of error. Researches of this kind were afterwards made on a large scale, on the lines suggested by Professor Freeman ; and they led, among other things, to the valuable publications of Philip J. Rulon in Sound Motion Pictures and Science Teaching published by the Harvard University Press in 1933 ; V. C. Arnspinger, Measuring the E0ec~ tiveness of Sound Pictures as Teaching Aids published by the Publications Office of Columbia University ; and Frederick L. Devereux The Educational Talking Picture published by the University of Chicago Press in 1933. These studies, and other minor ones, do not refer to the general teaching of didactic subjects by means of the film, but deal specifically with the didactic use of the sound and talking film. They deal with experiments which form a milestone on the road of scientific research, because their conclusions are not founded on simple suppositions and theories, which often cannot be put into practice or are contradictory, but on serious inquiries conducted in regard to numerous groups of pupils, in different school courses and in different didactic or scientific fields of experiment. In any case, the problem might arise, in connection with one and the same subject, the same course, a number of children with an identical mental and psychological development, of having to compare the varying utility and greater or less comprehensiveness, the efficacy, in short of the sound or talking film with that of the silent film on the same subject, logically, completed in the latter case by a more ample explanation or comment on the part of the teacher to supply its inevitable deficiencies. Contrast is the only real ground of comparison. Not because contrast must be considered as a pure and simple negation of past and far-off things, but because the possibility of a revision of ideas, concepts and facts may be shown most clearly by its means. Several experiments have been made, in every part of the world, with the system of making comparisons by means of parallels between sound and talking films and the silent film. These experiments, however, were limited and incomplete so far as regards their reference