Experimental Psychology at Wellesley College.
Mary Whiton Calkins.
After the discussion of the relative merits of experimental as compared with merely introspective psychology, a practical question suggests itself concerning the introduction of experimental psychology into the regular college curriculum. This is a complicated problem of expediency, the question of the equipment of the laboratory, of the relative amount of laboratory work, of the proper direction of students’ experiments. Such questions are especially prominent in cases in which psychology is a required subject, and in which our course is a general one and must be adapted to students without especial scientific training or without particular interest in experimental work. In such a course, it is sometimes urged, the introduction of experimental methods burdens the general student with details valuable only to the specialist, substitutes technical minutia for psychological principle and tends to confuse psychology with the other sciences.
This paper is an attempt to meet difficulties of this sort by the record of a year’s experience with a general course in psychology, making extensive use of experimental methods. In the fall of 1892 a course in “Psychology, including Experimental Psychology,” was offered at Wellesley College as one of the alternative senior requirements in psychology. The course was taken by fifty-four students, of whom all but one or two had had no previous training in the subject. All of these had taken a year’s course, including laboratory work, in chemistry, and only three had failed to follow a similar course in physics. Most had no training in physiology, and many of them had a more or less pronounced distaste for laboratory work. The aim throughout was to supplement, and in no sense to supersede, introspection; to lead students to observe in detail and to verify facts of their ordinary experience; to familiarize them with the results of modern investigation and With the usual experimental methods, and to introduce them to the important works of psychological literature.
The first month was devoted to a study of cerebral physiology. Ladd’s “Elements of Psychology” was used in this early part of the course as a text-book. The class work included recitations, informal lectures and some written work on the part of the students. One of these papers, for example, required an enumeration, accompanying a rough diagram, of the parts of the human brain, as developed from the dorsal and ventral sides respectively of the three “primary bulbs.” The study of the brain by text-book, by plates, and especially by models, preceded the dissection by each student of a lamb’s brain. The brains had been preserved according to Dr. James’s directions.[1] (Wide-mouthed candy jars, fitted with rubbers to prevent evaporation, proved an inexpensive substitute for the regular Whitehall and Taitum jars.) The dissection was under
- ↑ Since published in Briefer Course in Psychology, pp. 81 90.
