Now that we had addressed the issue of class resets, we went back to the Koch study to see if we could gain some insight into his teaching methods (see EXECUTIVE SUMMARY KOCH 1936). The following two examples clearly illustrate the challenges in interpreting the Koch study.

The Koch Method is not a sequence of characters but rather it is a method of character introduction that focuses on learning code as acoustic shapes.

Koch began by introducing two well-differentiated sound patterns played randomly without students being told what characters the two sounds corresponded to.  Students were asked to mark a sheet of paper by placing a dot each time they heard an acoustic shape.  This introduced the student to the rhythm and formed a connection between the acoustically recorded rhythm and the rhythm of the writing hand.  Only after the two sound patterns were heard as different and the student had adjusted to the rhythm, were the students told what characters the two sounds corresponded to. After a short period of practice, the relationships between the acoustic impression and the represented characters were firmly established.

Once mastery was achieved to about ninety percent accuracy, the next character was introduced. The new character was played randomly without students being told what character the new sound corresponded to, and students were again asked to mark a sheet of paper by placing a dot each time they heard the new acoustic shape. Character association followed and the three characters were practiced. Koch took special care not to exceed the student’s comprehension range. He did not allow more than three sound patterns to be introduced in the first half-hour of training.

The next three characters were introduced in the same manner. Two sound patterns together followed by a third, but as the number of previously learned characters increased, the two-character process began to overload students. The absorption of new characters and retention of previously learned characters were compromised.  The two-character process also took longer practice times to consolidate new characters as compared to introducing characters individually.

Koch also found that once students learned how to learn code as acoustic shapes, it was unnecessary to introduce new characters by playing them without students being told what character the new sound corresponded to.

In summary, playing characters without students being told what characters the sounds correspond to had merit, but the two-character process was ineffective and counterproductive.  It took many reads of the study to conclude that Koch was reluctant to admit it. A more casual read of the study would easily lead one to believe the two-character process was the essence of the Koch Method.

The Beginners Carousel curriculum introduces no more than three characters in any lesson, and characters are introduced individually. In BC1 characters are introduced in the Koch Method of playing them without telling students what character the new sound corresponds to. In BC2 characters are introduced in a traditional manner.

Koch reported on the Bucher 1924 report, Work and Rhythm, which found the rhythm which is created by the sequence of the signals in a certain tempo can also have a favorable influence on the performance, if the learning conditions make these effects favorable.

Koch experimented with amplification of the acoustic effect by using a two-tone process.  The concept was to relieve the considerable concentration required for a new student to differentiate between dits and dahs by playing them at different tones.  Doing so was found to facilitate the differentiation by making the code itself melodic.  The dash was given a slightly higher pitch than the dit.  The pitch differential was gradually reduced with each new letter and completely eliminated by the time one third of the characters had been introduced.  Side by side tests revealed students introduced to code using a two-toned process learned faster.

Here again our analyses brought Koch’s methods and findings into question. Koch provided a chart of the characters used in the two-tone experiments and using the repeated characters we were able to extract the sequence.

click image to enlarge

This is the character sequence used for the two-tone experiments:

H F A B G C D E (CH) L K I O T M P Q R S N U Y W V X Z 



Our analyses determined the difficulty of weighting was opposite to the first sequence with easy letters in the beginning and difficult letters at the end.  This order was used for testing the two-tone technique, which had maximum efficacy at the beginning.  Koch did not specify the number of students tested in this second group. He reported proficiency was achieved in 24 hours for the two-tone group compared to 27 hours for the single-tone group.

The deviation from the first character sequence with a weighing of easy letters to the beginning casts doubt on his findings. Regardless, we experimented with introducing two-tone characters to new students and the feedback was overwhelmingly negative. The technique was rejected, but we continued to study the relationship between rhythm and learning CW (SEE ENHANCING LEARNING CW WITH RHYTHM).

Curricula History
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