Dr. Scott McLeod recently wrote a post that discusses what information is really relevant and necessary for students to know in the age of hi-speed internet. This is the type of question and discussion that troubles me because teachers all over the country truly believe that knowing every single concept for their subject is necessary for students to be successful. Guess what? Research performed by Herman Ebbinghaus suggests that people forget 90% of what they learn in a class within 30 days and “most” of it within hours1. Consider what this research suggests and the implications for what we teach and the degree of magnitude we place on individual concepts and ideas.
Here’s the ugly truth: the reason that kids are required to “learn” this information is because we are all working diligently to perpetuate the system that made US successful when we were in school. More often than not, people judge their successes based on the failures of others. Students ABSOLUTELY have to know all this meaningless garbage because “we were forced to know it when I was in school and look how smart I am”. I think a lot about this ugly truth and how relevant it is to a lot of what goes on in schools today.
Forcing kids to learn material that has no bearing on their future success is ridiculous and dumb in this day and age. I love history. It’s my passion. But it is utterly ridiculous for me to force kids to memorize every battle of the Civil War when he or she can go look it up in a book or on Google and gain even more insight by reading about the topic. My real concern rests in whether or not kids can think critically abut the source or information that they are learning and make it applicable to their lives.
If you are requiring kids to memorize every objective in your curriculum guide then I would ask you to please consider this question: what bearing is this information going to have on a student’s future?
The reality is that we need a value shift in education when it comes to curriculum and what we teach our kids. We should be working with them to develop skills necessary to make quality decisions over where they take their information from and the quality of secondary sources they acquire to assert their ideas. Even if a student needs to know tidbits of information (like the parts of a neuron) later on in life, Ebbinghaus’ research suggests that they have no choice but to look it up.
1Medina, J. J. (2009). Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Chicago: Pear Press. p. 100
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
WOW, this is amazing. It’s stating something that if I had been thinking for years I have never voiced. It’s true, why would you need to know and memorize seemingly irrelevant nonsense and dates and trivia when literally NONE of it will help further your life !!!
Surely the point of education is to learn. The next point of education is to learn something relevant. If school and education generally does not help achieve these things – then what is the point? The work we do (www.thebigpicture.eu.com) is totally focused on relevant learnings about life. That’s it. We are the absolute No.1 provider of this in the UK and we’re also the fastest growing. We teach kids stuff that they want to learn NOT stuff that they don’t !!! http://www.thebigpicture.eu.com
In n my hundreds of hours observing in schools we are not teaching children or young adults to memorize anything. As a result, you have a generation of Jay Leno stooges who couldn’t tell you if the Civil War came before or after WW2 or locate China on a map. They’ve spent time building toothpick bridges, dropping eggs without breaking, making maple syrup, constructing cardboard castles, and generally wasting their time as well meaning teachers thought that they were being creative and generating “interest.” Many of the current teachers come from this knowledge-less generation and the pool of teachers doesn’t even have the underlying knowledge anymore to convey or connect important concepts to. (read Daniel Willingham or E.D. Hirsch) And they know they were cheated. Talk to most 20 + year olds about their education and they’ll agree that they frittered their time away in school.
Now if you think that someone becoming a banker, or a nurse, or an engineer or an architect doesn’t benefit from knowing philosophy or reading Dickens, or knowing where Israel is along with some foundational information about what the whole Mideast concept is about, but rather should simply know what their job is about then your perspective is understandable. But to expect adults or teens to “learn it on their own” as adult life-long learners when the school didn’t provide the learning experiences needed for connecting knowledge (again, see the cognitive psychologists like Willingham) is a pipe dream.
Fortunately, for ethics and growth of mankind, other nations don’t hold this perspective of expecting kids to generate their own learning from experience. They are still teaching. Watch an Indian or Chinese teacher and you’ve witnessed a dramatic difference. Unfortunately, for the United States, we become less competitive and we are starting to see the decline of creativity as we produce a more illiterate, know-less generation. When you know less, you have less resources for creativity. REserach shows that it takes the average person between 8- 14 encounters saying, writing, specifically applying a new vocabulary word or fact until it’s in long-term memory. Kids today in the US are lucky if they get more than one. A typical reading class in the US consists of the teacher reading a fiction story to the students, followed by a small group of students leading their own discussion of a book which often they don’t have the skills to read, followed by journaling.
Compare that to my kid’s Montessori school where they had to memorize the names and locations of Continents by the end of kindergarten, where by the end of first grade they had to pick up any of six or seven rocks and name it and tell something about it as well as know all of the South and North America Countries. By eighth grade they knew the names and many of the stories of the constellations and could located any country on the earth as well as its capital city. Later when they sat in college history, English, Psych., etc. classes, other students longingly asked them how they knew so “much.” Those other students were struggling to keep their heads above water having little to tie in to that history or English literature. “Our teachers taught us” replied my kids. The key was being taught not hoping they would absorb the knowledge through their skin as your answer implies should happen.
@Melissa
If I had a million Internets, I’d give them all to you for your statements. School isn’t just a centre created to produce workers–rather it is a centre of knowledge transmission for a society from one generation to another. In the quest to ensure our students adapt to the rapidly-changing world, we’ve deemed the recall of knowledge as irrelevant and somehow beneath us as educators that we have created a generation of adults who have zero capability to remember anything. By ignoring the research from cognitive scientists that persistently show that children’s brains are a fertile ground for permanent storage of knowledge if they memorize them between the ages of 6-11, we leave our students without the cognitive ability to store and retain knowledge after that age since the brain doesn’t know how to do it.
I teach at a school that is borderline failing. Most of the things discussed on this blog are but a gleam in my eye because I have more pressing needs like the fact that 80% of my seventh grade reading students read below a sixth grade level at over 50% through the school year. What my students need is not Socratic circles, questioning the author’s purpose, or any of the other literacy strategies my state’s DoE require me to teach because these kids can’t read with comprehension. Period. It makes no sense that I have to repeat concepts 20+ times for them to have the slightest bit of comprehension. It also makes no sense that they get the same questions incorrect on every single quiz I give when I leave the same questions in the exact same spots on said quizzes.
Whilst you may be onto something about the idea that every child needs to know about the siting of Grant’s guns during the siege of Vicksburg, by ignoring or marginalizing rote memorization, you have undermined the entire concept of a hierarchy of thinking by ignoring the foundation. How can someone evaluate something when they have no knowledge to base their opinions on? How can you synthesize new information when there is no prior information to use as a reference point?
By continuing this line of thinking, the dissemination of knowledge from generation to generation is lessening by the year, and before long we will have an entire underclass of people of all ethnicity and creeds bound together buy the fact that they know nothing of substance. If that’s been the unconscious goal of education leaders, then they can sit back and pat each other on the back; they’ve done their job.
When the priority of school becomes cognitive, problem-solving, collaborative skills, students become far more authentically interested in learning and that passion leads to understanding content. Unfortunately, the reverse is not true.
The only difference between the student who studies ‘properly’ and the student who crams – the student who crams forgets everything 30 minutes before the test while the good student forgets everything 30 minutes after the test.
@Melissa
Now Melissa…unless your kids went to some fringe Montessori School, those kids weren’t taught facts but simply picked them up because they were taught in a more meaningful way. School teach facts with no meaning, therefore no retention.
Also Indian, Chinese, and Korean school are also starting to make a slow shift from a fact based curriculum to a more “imaginative” one.
Beyond rote memorization, when presenting facts that can be Googled, part of teaching is showing the importance and context of the facts. It not just teaching children how to locate information, but how to hunger for it.
Loren,
I agree with the fact that we need to maintain a base level of information that is uniform across the board, but I don’t think that we need to require students to memorize every potential factoid or idea throughout their years of schooling. There are certain ideas, topics, and information that students simply have to memorize and, as the research states, memorization is an important aspect of the learning pyramid. My fault comes when we require kids to memorize information that they will never have to use again simply because we deem it important for our subject areas. I think that there are certain things that equate to “good memorization” and certain ideas that equate to “bad memorization”.
For instance, it is imperative that students learn to memorize the Bill of Rights. As the progression suggests, students eventually learn these ideas and memorization is no longer needed because they are able to apply them and make the learning relevant. But for me to turn around and have my students memorize every signer of the Constitution would be utterly preposterous. It is simply useless knowledge given the fact that they will, eventually, have to reference the Bill of Rights in their lives, but when will anyone ever ask them the names of all the signers? I realize this is an “off the deep end” example, but the idea is there.
I can’t see punishing kids (poor grades) for not memorizing mundane information when there is more important knowledge that should take priority. This practice isn’t lessening the knowledge base of our society. It is simply acknowledging that information grows at exponential rates and decisions must be made as to what draws attention from students’ time and what doesn’t.
My point is that there is a difference between memorizing information that eventually makes its way up the pyramid of learning and memorizing information for the sake of saying we did.
Thanks for engaging in this conversation!
Hi Aaron,
Upon further reflection over a cup of hot cocoa, I think we may just be on opposite sides of the same street. I think the issue really is what information is “unimportant” for our students to learn. To me that’s a call that comes down to the individual teacher, but in reality the central office takes the bulk of that responsibility. Our school district is implementing Marzano’s vocabulary strategies, and to be honest, my kids need to learn through outright rote memorization far more than the other schools on the other end of the district.
My kids are only a couple of generations removed from a sharecropping society, and their worldview is mind-blowingly small. They don’t have the background to fall on like the kids in probably 90% of your readership, so they have way more to catch up on. When we do a reading selection, I’ve found that I have to spend a good ten minutes plus giving them background to the setting and things they’re going to come across in the story that we all take for granted. I don’t test them on that information, but I do informal assessment to make sure they at least grasp the concept. I’m currently working on my PowerPoint for O. Henry’s A Retrieved Reformation, and I know they’re going to have to learn and understand what a safe actually is, because they don’t have a clue.
In the end, I think the amount that is “useless” really comes down to the upbringing of the students themselves. When I was in public schools (K-6), I went to a school broadly similar to the one I teach at now. Many of my schoolmates were as clueless as mine are now, but I was so far ahead of the curve it was ludicrous. My parents made sure of this by my weekly trips to the library, which only ended when I moved away to college.
Regardless, good article and good discussion even though I think the critters could do with a little more memorizing and a little less Googling. Ironically, as I was typing this, I was commenting to a friend how Saturn’s rings came to be. No need for Google. I remembered it. Cheers!
I would suggest checking out “Why Student’s Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom” by Daniel T. Willingham for more perspective on this argument.
I don’t have the book with me, so I’ll do my best to capture the essence of his point: basic facts at the brain’s disposal are crucial for the efficiency of more complicated mental processes.
The basic idea is that short-term/working memory is our bottle neck for working cognitive processes, and the memory as we know can generally hold about 7 items. We can stretch this limit by “chunking” information. That is, “Sarah Rainsberger” is two items, but because I know who Sarah Rainsberger is, my brain can chunk that info into a single item, leaving me with more space in my working memory. Similarly, “the blue bag of sharp things” is 6 words, but at my house that’s the description for the travel bag that contains scissors, razor blades, corkscrews etc. As a known entity, it’s now one single item in working memory. Willingham’s example in the book is a paragraph-long description, action by action, of what most of us know as a “double play.” So in that case, an entire paragraph sparks the “oh, it’s a double play” reaction, and the reader has (on average) 6 more slots in working memory for linking this idea with other thoughts.
This doesn’t mean that memorizing every single fact is the most appropriate educational tactic, but it implies that the more facts we have at our disposal, the easier we can string those facts together and perform tasks such as comprehension, analysis, synthesis etc.
His book mentions a study wherein students were given reading comprehension tests. The students had previously been classified according to their achievement levels in school (or some other general indication of how successful they were as students – actually, I think it might have been reading level) and also classified as to their background knowledge of the subject matter of the reading comprehension passage. The study revealed that the student’s prior reading level was not a significantly correlated with their performance on the reading comprehension test. Rather, their background knowledge of the subject was.
This means that even “weak” readers with domain-specific knowledge tended to score significantly higher than “strong” readers. I think that’s a pretty compelling argument for not relying too much on the fact that kids can easily access facts when/if they need them. Rather, perhaps we should be worrying about why kids aren’t retaining the facts they do learn and whether, as you suggest Aaron, we’re asking kids to recall too many facts at the expense of really learning useful ones.
This is so true. In the age of instant information access students need to know how to analyze, review, and apply information.
It’s funny because I just wrote an article similar to this -http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2010/01/should-we-force-students-to-learn.html
Colleges are also stating that high schools need to teach depth and analysis, not breadth of material.
Since a student can access any information at a instant via the internet, why have them memorize things? If you teach them how to use the information, they will retain some information, while doing real work.
I’m a believer in this and use Project Based Learning as a means to teaching students how to find, analyze, and use information. (http://krunchd.com/projectbasedlearn)
The idea that facts and content knowledge are irrelevant is one of the hardiest perennials in education. It sounds so commonsensical — knowledge changes too quickly, knowledge changes too quickly, so let’s teach kids to solve problems and think critically — but it’s not that simple.
Most of our big picture goals for education – like the ability to read with understanding, think critically and solve problems – are skills. But every one of these goals is 100% dependent on content. There’s no way to accomplish these big goals without a broad, rich curriculum in history, geography, science, literature and the arts. As much as we might wish otherwise, there is no such thin as an all-purpose thinker or problem solver. There are no shortcuts. It’s not a question of having kids memorize a bunch of disconnected facts, but rather grappling with rich, meaningful content.
A previous poster mentioned Dan Wwillingham’s work. I heartily concur.
@Sarah Rainsberger
I have been to some keynotes and workshops that advocate for moving kids into areas of interest or strength at a crucial point in their education so that they may become more directly educated in the specifics of the discipline. I wonder if this model of creating specificity in what students learn would be the balance needed for learning.
For example, students with a strength in crafting with their hands would be given knowledge, terminology. As we specialize in Universities and Colleges, students would gain relevant specific information that is relevant to them, and would seem to support Wwillingham’s research. I have not read the work, so I do not know what he proposes from his findings, but it is good food for thought.
I for one would love to see students that are completely ill-fitted for our current school model be able to move into a trade or art earlier to give them the support and direction traditional teaching cannot! It would help so many.
Great post and replies.
My BIG question is why is our dropout rate SO elevated?? My gut feeling points to extinguishing the love for learning by testing the students to death.
I dutifully attended school but NeVER uncovered my passions
Sad state of affairs for our upcoming students
@ Kathleen The reasons for the dropout rate are far more complicated than you imply. However, lack of engagement in the learning process may be a factor for some.
Re: the post: What is your evidence that teaching and learning, is based predominately on the memorization of information?
I disagree with you. History is a very vital part of learning. The only problem is students not taking it seriously or listening to what is going on. History teaches the mistakes of the past, without it, we are doomed to repeat and loop what has already happened. So when we are ‘forced’ to memorize every battle about the civil war it is actually teaching you not only about what not to do in situations but the consequences of your actions are. An insightful student will look at history as a lesson in life while an unenthusiastic student will look at history with impatiens and simply want the class to end.