STUDIES ON THE MEASUREMENT OF ACHIEV MENT IN SIMPLE ARITHMETIC DRILLS FROM THE INFLECTIONS OF EVENT-RELATED POTENTIALS

摘要

It is important to properly measure the effect of a learning method. It is well known that the cerebral nervous system plays a central role in learning tasks. The brain activities can be observed through electric signals called electroencephalograms (EEG). Event-related potentials (ERP) are obtained by taking the average of many experimental data measured as EEG. We use ERP to extract the important information concerning the brain activities in the learning process of subjects who engage themselves in learning tasks. As examples of learning tasks, we use simple arithmetic drills such as the additions of 1-digit, 2-digit, and 3-digit positive integers. For the evaluation of the arithmetic tasks, we adopt the following indices: (1) The effect of repetitive learning. (2) The rates of difficulty for arithmetic drills. (3) The ratio of correct responses to drills by each subject. We presume that the achievement of the repetitive learning tasks can be estimated from the inflections of ERP of each subject. We categorize the subjects into group I and group II according to their features. In our data analysis, we introduce some variables that indicate characteristics of ERP. By analyzing ERP for each group of subjects we confirm that the effect of repetitive learning reflects clearly to ERP.