The average number of words in a student’s response was approximately quadrupled.“ONE OF THE great frustrations of teaching,” remarked a teacher in a discussion about type, “is that you are always robbing Peter to pay Paul. You design something to reach one group of students, knowing that in so doing you are going to turn off another group. It is somewhat comforting to find that there is a perfectly understandable explanation.” Thousands of teachers know this problem from personal experience. This chapter offers a logical interpretation of the problem and may suggest a method of attack.
Type makes a natural and predictable difference in learning styles and in student response to teaching methods. An understanding of type can help to explain why some students catch on to a way of teaching and like it, whereas others do not catch on and do not like it. Two distinct problems are involved here. Catching on is a matter of communication. Liking it is a matter of interest.
Communication from teacher to student begins with the spoken word in the classroom, where the student must be able to listen effectively, and later includes the written word in textbooks, which the student must be able to read. Because words, the necessary medium of education, have to be translated from symbols into meaning by the listener’s intuition, the translation is naturally easier for intuitives than for sensing types. Intuitives use their favorite kind of perception, but sensing types have to use their less-liked, less-developed kind of perception, which takes more time and effort, especially when the words are abstract.
The first days of school are critical to the education of sensing children. Up to this time, they have focused their attention on the concrete realities around them, the things they can see, touch, and handle. Suddenly they are in a setting where they can not operate as usual. Everything seems to be words, some of which may not be familiar enough to be meaningful. And the words go by so fast. Children are often caught in the same predicament as adults who are trying to converse with a foreigner in the foreigner’s language. Unfamiliar words take extra time to translate, and when the words go by too fast, translation becomes impossible.
It is fortunate that the teacher has control of how fast the words go by. Recognizing how much the sensing children need time to take in and understand words, the teacher can speak more slowly and pause after each sentence. Intuitive children will use the pause to add thoughts to what was said. Sensing children will use it to make sure they understand the teacher’s words. Each sentence will then be a success in communication for all the children.
The children’s ability to cope is at stake here. In the unfamiliar world of school, they deeply need to feel adequate, and the best way to feel adequate is to be adequate. If they genuinely do well in their required tasks by using their perception (to understand the task) and judgment (to do it right), they strengthen both for future use. The satisfaction of knowing something new or being able to do something new will provide inner motivation for further effort and further development.
However, if children consistently fail (or feel they are failing), the resulting discouragement may inhibit future effort and block not only the required learning but even more important, the development of the perception and judgment.
The habit of failure is extremely costly for the child, the educational system, and society as a whole. All reasonable precautions should be taken against failure. Required tasks should be simple and explicit, and they should make a definite contribution to the child’s knowledge or skill. From the first day of school, the teacher needs to make it plain that there are many valuable and interesting things to be learned and there are reliable ways to learn them. Essential to any reading method is the reassurance that letters stand for sounds and, therefore, a printed word shows the reader what it would sound like if it were spoken.
Beginning readers should always be aware of the relationship between sounds and symbols. Of course, it comes very easily to some children, and they may use it before they begin school. If children know their letters and find out that letters stand for sounds, they can read as soon as they figure out the code. Children can match the letters and sounds by studying the spellings in a story or rhyme known by heart. They might point to a word printed on a book, newspaper, or cereal box and ask, “What does this say?” If their families do not answer, they ask a neighbor or the mail carrier. Every time children discover a new sound equivalent to a letter, they store it mentally.
With all the sounds and letters firmly in mind, children can read most of the words that are in their speaking vocabularies and many that are not. Coming across words they know but have not seen in print, they translate letters into sounds, sound out the word, and recognize it. After a few repetitions, they do not need to bother with separate sounds, but can translate the written word into the spoken word and eventually translate the written word directly into its meaning. For most unfamiliar words, the unconscious offers new readers a suggestion of what the word should sound like and a tentative meaning based on context. When a dictionary or other experience with the word establishes its meaning, children can read it correctly the rest of their lives without ever hearing it spoken.
The children who seem to teach themselves are those with a driving desire to read. Most children need help in learning the meaning (that is, the sound) of the symbols, and some children need a great deal of help. A growing number of schools are now teaching the sound-symbol relationships explicitly, letter by letter, from the start of first grade, so that children of all types can learn to deal confidently with the written word.
Some children, who do not have the luck to go to such schools, do not discover the principles of reading on their own or with their parents’ help. They are expected to acquire a vocabulary of “sight words” before learning to sound out words. These children clutter their minds with false assumptions: that there is no good explanation of how to read, or surely the teacher would have given it; that a reader must find some way to remember each separate word—a task that gets harder the more one reads; and that there is no way to be sure what a word is until the teacher says it. They learn by the word-attack method, that is, they identify a word from its general shape or from its place on a familiar page or by remembering what comes next in the story or by looking at the nearest picture. None of these makeshift techniques is reliable in the actual reading of new material. They only obscure the real problem and its solution. The real problem is that the child who does not learn to translate letters into sounds can only “read” by memory and has no way to cope with new words.
The translation of sound-symbols is easiest for the introverts with intuition. In first grade the IN pupils are likely to be the quickest to catch on to the symbols and often are delighted withthem. But the extravert children with sensing, the ES pupils, who make only minimal use of either intuition or introversion, may find the symbols so confusing that they become discouraged about the whole business of going to school. They may even decide, hopelessly or defiantly, that school is not for them.
Confusion about symbols is a very serious matter. Children of any type are doomed to flounder in school if they do not learn the meanings of the symbols by which language is written and must be read. They will be poor readers or nonreaders, depending on the depth of their confusion. They will do badly on achievement tests and intelligence tests. They will probably be bored by what they do not understand and may well be humiliated because they do not understand it. They tend to drop out of school as soon as possible. Their failures may be blamed on low IQ or perhaps on emotional difficulty, whereas actually the failures and the low IQ and the emotional difficulty could all result from one omission. Nobody helped them, in the beginning, to learn the explicit meaning of the sound-symbols.
In schools where the introduction of phonics is postponed, the sounds of the letters are eventually discussed, but only intermittently and as just one method of word attack among many. By this time the damage has been done and some students may be hopelessly behind. They cannot forget the old methods they used; they can only learn the new and store them side by side with the old. Of course, the new methods help, and the earlier they are learned, the more they help. But these children are not likely to become as skilled in the new methods as they would have with the right method from the start. For some children, the right method is too little and too late and never really works at all.
Communication from student to teacher, a relatively unrecognized aspect of education, has far-reaching consequences. It is needed whenever a teacher tries to find out orally or by a test how much students have learned or what they can do. When student-to-teacher communication is curtailed for any reason, it may leave the teacher with an unduly low estimate of the students’ actual knowledge.
The speed with which intuitives translate words into meanings gives them an obvious advantage in any timed test of verbal ability or timed IQ test in which verbal ability figures. The extent of their advantage is evident when the scores of these tests are analyzed by type. Educational Testing Service made such an analysis on a large scale in the late 1950s before deciding to publish the Type Indicator (Myers, 1962). Among eleventh and twelfth-grade students in academic courses at 30 Pennsylvania high schools, the average IQ of the intuitives topped that of the sensing types by 7.8 points for males and 6.7 points for females. Among male freshmen from five colleges, the mean SAT Verbal Ability score was 47 points higher for intuitives than for sensing students.
It is easy to assume that a substantial difference in native intelligence is indicated by such differences—about half a standard deviation, to put it statistically. That is far from the truth, however. Much of the sensing students’ disadvantage on the tests is due simply to their test-taking technique.
For example, the ISFJ woman who thought she had to read every test question three or four times (see p. 59) was challenged by co-workers to take a parallel form of the test she had taken when applying for the job, but this time she would read each question only once. Although she agreed reluctantly, her second “IQ” score was ten points higher than the first.
Most sensing students who reread test questions at the expense of precious time could raise their scores by reading each question only once, but they are likely to be unwilling to try anything so rash. In effect, they do not trust their intuition to get the true meaning at first glance and, to an extent, they are right. Their reliance on soundness of understanding instead of quickness of understanding is a basic part of their strength and something to be respected rather than discouraged.
A fairer solution would permit sensing students to demonstrate their ability without having to violate their principle of making sure. By taking the time limit off the tests, teachers could turn them into power tests instead of speed tests. This solution does not lose or distort real differences in intelligence. Using the Wechsler as a standard measure of intelligence, Joseph Kanner (1975) explored the results of giving the Otis as a power test to two samples of over 400 students each. As ordinarily given, the Otis was expected to correlate about .49 with the Wechsler. As a power test, the r was .70 in one sample and .92 in the other. The results are hard to explain on any other ground than that the demand for speed obscures the true intelligence level as registered by the Wechsler.
Of course, speed is an undeniable asset in and beyond school. Both sensing and intuitive students might well benefit from exercises expressly designed to develop speed of response, but speed should not be confused with the substance of learning. Teaching methods should not make speed a prerequisite or a substitute for learning in general, and it should not be used to measure the extent of students’ knowledge or the soundness of their reasoning.
Currently, reading teachers appear to be less concerned with the mechanics of reading than with comprehension of the material, that is, the use of higher levels of cognition, including logic and inference. The remarkable work of Dr. Mary Budd Rowe (1974a &1974b), of the Department of Childhood Education at the University of Florida, indicates that on these higher levels, too, a decrease in the demand for speed can produce an important improvement in results.
Dr. Rowe’s study involved detailed analysis of over 300 classroom tape recordings of children in the early grades responding to science programs that were designed to provoke inquiry about nature. Two trends consistently emerged: The children’s contributions were very meager, eight words in length on the average; and the pace of instruction was extremely fast. Teachers asked questions in rapid succession and waited an average of only one second for a child’s answer before repeating or rephrasing the question, asking another question, or putting the same question to another child.
When children did answer but paused to frame their next sentences, teachers waited a little less than a second on the average before interrupting with comment or with another question. On the few tapes where the length and quality of children’s responses were the kind that the programs were meant to encourage, the teacher had waited an average of about three seconds.
The findings of the first study led to larger scale studies of the consequences of persuading or training the teachers to wait three or more seconds. The results were impressive:
The average number of words in a student’s response was approximately quadrupled.
The frequency of relevant statements volunteered was more than tripled.
The frequency of responses showing inference from evidence was more than doubled.
The frequency of speculative responses was more than tripled.
Failures to respond were reduced from once in two minutes to once in fifteen minutes.
A side effect, that teachers had few occasions for discipline, suggests that even the least scholarly children found the new proceedings more worthy of their attention.
One result that teachers had not foreseen was that they had a more favorable evaluation of some of the least promising students. After the teachers identified the five best and five poorest students in the class, the original tapes were scrutinized, revealing that teachers gave the five best students twice as much time to answer as they gave the five poorest. The teachers probably expected little or nothing from the poorest students, but with three seconds in which to respond, the bottom group began to answer in new and surprising ways, which were gratifying but inexplicable on the basis of their past performance.
From the standpoint of type, these changes are wholly explicable. The five poorest students would be sensing children who need more time to assimilate the substance of what they have heard. Even three seconds may make a large difference. It is exciting to speculate how much the performance of students in the lower half of a class might improve if they regularly had at least three more seconds in which to order their thoughts for expression. The advantage they would derive could extend far beyond the classroom into all the years of their lives.
In teaching, the other main problem related to type is the students’ interest. Intuitives and sensing types differ greatly in what they find interesting in any subject even if they like, that is, are interested in, the same subjects. Intuitives like the principle, the theory, the why. Sensing types like the practical application, the what and the how. Most subjects have both theoretical and practical aspects and can be taught with the emphasis on either.
However a subject is taught, students tend to remember only the parts that capture their attention and interest. Theoretical presentations and assignments are likely to bore the sensing students. The practical side without the theory tends to bore the intuitives. A fifty-fifty mixture can be expected to bore everybody half the time. If students are allowed to spend most of their time on the aspects they will remember and find useful in their lives, there will be much more enthusiasm for education among its intended beneficiaries, and much more learning will take place.
In the textbooks of the future, an introduction to each chapter could present the essentials that all students must know in order to understand the aspects they will tend to find most interesting. The introduction could be followed by one section designed for sensing types and one for intuitives. Students could elect which to study, and either would suffice for credit. Exams would cover all three sections. Students would answer questions covering the introduction and the section of their choice. If some students studied all three sections, they could answer additional questions with the possibility of improving their grades.
Even without these textbooks, teachers can give students choices in assignments, projects, and even final exams. One teacher regularly supplies one group of questions for intuitives and others for sensing students and allows individual students to choose which they prefer to answer, as long as they answer a required number. Sometimes she permits students to compose a question that interests them and substitute it for one of hers. Many students, she says, do not take advantage of the permission. Perhaps they suddenly discover that it is more difficult to write a good exam question than they thought.
Teachers who are interested in type have at their disposal a laboratory for the observation of students’ reactions to the classroom alternatives and for the formation of hypotheses based on those reactions. Programmed learning, for example, can seem restful to sensing students because it does not hurry them, and boring to intuitives because they cannot hurry it. One intuitive said that it would be all right if there were an “aha!” button he could push as soon as he understood.
At very young ages, the SN preference may show itself in ways that suggest useful alternatives. A second-grader who, according to his mother, was the only sensing member in their sizable family, was indifferent to reading and being read to. When she started reading him a child’s history of actual events, his indifference was cured. “Did that really happen? Did people really do that?” His excited interest in real events confirmed that he had a need for indisputable reality. Of course, this is only one striking example, but it suggests that sensing children just starting to read may be much more interested if they are offered crisp facts, with a picture to go with each, instead of juvenile fiction or fairy tales.
A final word of warning may be in order. What is urged here is the use of interest as an aid to learning useful things, but never the acceptance of a lack of interest as an excuse for not learning things that need to be learned. The basic skills must be learned; the essentials for competence in an occupation must be learned.
When students are not interested in something that they must learn, they have two options. One is sheer application, which is not as prestigious as aptitude or as stimulating as interest, but it gets the job done. Application is most often used by J types, who run their outer lives with their judgment rather than their perception. Whether by chance or choice, the majority of sensing students are J. If they have the strengths of the judging type, they meet their deadlines and complete their undertakings, which is no mean achievement.
The other option was recommended to me at the age of four, in a conversation I remember word for word:
“Mother, what can I do?”
“Your closet needs to be straightened up.”
“But I’m not interested in my closet.”
“Well, get interested!”
That, in a nutshell, is the solution for students who find that application is a problem. There are a number of ways to get interested in an assignment, once the student takes a good look at it.
The assignment may be an exercise for improving some skill. If so, what is the skill? Is the student approaching it in the most efficient way? Can the student do it a bit better than last time?
The assignment may be an explanation of something. If so, just what is the point? Is it a complete explanation, or is the student being offered different viewpoints and left to choose the most reasonable?
The assignment may be an account of something the student may need to use someday. If so, how and when could it be used? What would have to be done to make it work?
Or the assignment may be some isolated name or date or rule the student is expected to remember. If so, would a rhyming couplet make it easier to remember?
In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
I before E
Except after C
Or when sounded like aye
As in neighbor or weigh.
Finally, if teaching that subject and making that assignment, what would the student do to make it more interesting?