Richard Drake, in the September, 1935, issue of this Journal, reports an interesting experiment comparing two methods of teaching high school algebra?an and an The results, however, are not so interesting because the technique used in the ' ' individual method, ' ' is such that no one who has seriously concerned himself with individual work would think of advocating it. His indi vidual-group ' ' method on the other hand is probably a rather good sample of sane group instruction. Practically his experiment is a comparison between reasonably good teaching and definite assignments, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, almost no teaching and no assignments. Unfortunately he does not make this issue clear and confuses it by calling the latter the ' ' individual method. ' ' For both methods Drake used a textbook adapted to what Drake calls the individual-group plan?i.e., a text which requires, like most texts, a considerable amount of elucidation by the teacher. Drake's class that was taught by the group method (it is a bit confusing and cumbersome to keep calling it, as he does, the individual-group method) used the text appropriately, i.e., the teacher introduced topic to the entire group, using the first part of every period to do some real teaching in connection with the text. The youngsters on the however, simply plunged into the book to work things out by themselves. While the author of the text claims that it is self-instructive, even a casual examination of it by a teacher experienced in individual work, leads to the immediate conclusion that only the unusually bright and diligent child could possibly learn from it without considerable elucida tion by the teacher. True, like the group method students, those taught by the got some remedial help from the teacher, if after taking the practice test at the end of a week's unit they seemed to need such remedial help. Except for this, however, they apparently received little or no teaching. As if this were not a sufficient handicap, each student did only as many problems as he felt to be necessary in order to understand the work! Children brand new to the study of algebra, freshmen in high school, were expected to decide for themselves, seemingly unaided, how much practice they needed on step of the work. It would be a re 680