Mental fatigue : a comprehensive exposition of the nature of mental fatigue, of the methods of its measurement and of their results, with special reference to the problems of instruction / by Dr. Max Offner tr. from the German by Guy Montrose Whipple.
- Offner, Max, 1864-1932.
- Date:
- 1911
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Mental fatigue : a comprehensive exposition of the nature of mental fatigue, of the methods of its measurement and of their results, with special reference to the problems of instruction / by Dr. Max Offner tr. from the German by Guy Montrose Whipple. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.
65/152 page 53
![for one such test. The difficulty with this interesting method lies in the selection of texts that shall afford, for a full series of tests for a day, not to speak of a week, an approximately equal distribution of the let- ters or words to be cancelled.* The rapid develop- ment of practice also tends oftentimes, at the begin- ning, to conceal the effect of fatigue. Still simpler is the copying method employed by M. C. Schuyten, the conductor of the Pedological In- stitute at Antwerp {Arch, de Psych., IV, and Paed. Jaarh., VI, 160 if.). The teacher writes on the black- board a certain number of combinations of the letters a, e, %, 0, u, r, v, n. The pupils have five minutes in which to copy them. The number of errors and [self- made] corrections gives a measure of attention, and hence of the mental efficiency prevailing at the time, and the variation in this number at different hours of the day serves as a basis for estimating the course of the fatigue developed by the day's work. Perhaps the most suitable method, both because it exacts activities that are neither too easy for the sub- jects nor too difficult for evaluation by the experi- menter, and because it entails manifold forms of men- tal activity and so does not become monotonous and irksome,t is the combined method by which Teljat- nikj tested 25 Volksschule girls, averaging 9 years of age. ♦Several plans for meeting this difficulty are now available. See Manual, 256-7.—Translator. fThe method, however, does take considerable time, some 20 minutes, when used for testing fatigue, and may thus itself become a source of fatigue. $See Teljatnik's report of his own researches as prepared for Burgerstein's Handhuch der Schulhygiene, 2d ed., pp. 462 ff.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21211632_0065.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
