Elective Perfectibility

"If at first you don't succeed" - That hoary homily drilled into the heads of recalcitrant Victorian schoolboys has been rejuvenated in an up-to-date and most successful - form in a psychology course at the College.

Professor G. Christian Jernstedt has been cited as one of 12 outstanding college and university teachers by Change magazine for the methods and philosophy used in teaching his course in "Learning."

His thesis is that the aim of education is the use of knowledge and that, if a student uses knowledge correctly, he therefore possesses it. His method embodies what has been called "the principle of elective perfectibility."

Traditional examinations and papers have been dispensed with in Psychology 22, as memory exercises or one-shot efforts easily forgotten. Instead the student uses two textbooks about learning, two other books, and a novel. During the term he is asked to write nine briefs on specific topics, analyzing a scene from the novel in terms of laboratory knowledge about learning. Each brief is graded promptly and returned with suggestions for improvement. The student may rewrite the brief until he is satisfied with the grade, limited only by the length of the term and the requirement that each must be acceptable before the next is attempted.

The average student does 20 to 30 rewrites per term, more on the early briefs. With anywhere between 135 and 225 enrolled, the number of briefs to be graded runs about 4,000. Teaching assistants enrolled in an advanced seminar in learning, themselves veterans of Psychology 22, act as readers, a different one grading each version of a brief.

Since students may continue to submit improved drafts as far as time and their energies permit, final grades are obviously higher than in the average college course. But to achieve whatever level of success he or she decides is sufficient, the student tries and tries and tries again - 14 times is the record to date. Meanwhile, he learns a lot about learning.