teaching by the intelligence of successive responses. The pupil is
being trained in systematic thought and in concentration. But it must
be remembered that the development method is often costly in time
because answers may be wrong or irrelevant. It may encourage
wandering; a student's reply reveals ignorance of a basic principle,
and the aim of the lesson is often forgotten in the eagerness to
patch up this misconception. Then, too, in subject matter that is
arbitrary, as in descriptive and narrative history, no development is
possible. In such cases the questions are designed to test the
student's knowledge of the text, and the lesson becomes a quiz rather
than a development.

It is plain, therefore, that a judicious combination of the lecture
and development methods will give better results than the exclusive
use of either one. The analysis of the pedagogical advantages of each
leads to the conclusion that the development method should predominate
and that the lecture method should be used sparingly and always with
some of the checking devices described.

=Place of reference reading in college teaching=

=Evaluation of development--Socratic or heuristic method=

A common method employed in advanced courses in college subjects
emphasizes _reference study and research_. The entire course is
reduced to a series of problems, each of which deals with a vital
aspect of the subject. Each student is made responsible for a topic.
The initial hours are devoted to an examination of the common sources
of information in this specific subject, the modes of using these, the
standards to be attained in writing a paper on one of the topics, and
similar matters. The remainder of the term is given over to seminar
work: each student reads his paper and holds himself in readiness to
answer all questions his classmates may ask on his topic. The aims of
such a course are obviously to develop a knowledge of sources and an
ability to use intelligently the unorganized data found by the
student. The results of these pseudo-seminar courses are far from what
was anticipated. A thorough investigation of such a course will soon
convince the teacher that the seminar method, whatever its merits in
university training, must be refined and diluted before it is applied
to college teaching. Let us see why.

Successful reference reading requires a knowledge of the field
studied, maturity of mind, discriminating judgment in the selection of
materia