In today’s world, is there a reason to memorize anything? You can find any factual information you need in seconds via the Internet. Perhaps instead of learning facts, some teachers believe it’s better to practice critical thinking, to have students work at evaluating all the information available on the Internet rather than trying to commit some small part of it to memory.
Data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most-critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving-are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment). 
Much of the time when we see someone apparently engaged in thinking, he or she is actually engaged in memory retrieval. As I described yesterday, memory is the cognitive process of first resort. When faced with a problem, you will first search for a solution in memory, and if you find one you will very likely use it. For example, you might have a friend who can walk into someone else’s kitchen and produce a nice dinner from whatever food is around. When your friend looks in a cupboard, she doesn’t see ingredients, she see recipes. She’s drawing on her extensive background knowledge about food and cooking. Take her to the garage instead, give her a box of auto parts and she will not be able to rebuild your carburetor.
It’s often difficult for students to understand new ideas, especially ones that are really novel, meaning they aren’t related to other things they have already learned. That’s because people understand new ideas (things we don’t know) by relating them to old ideas (things we do know).
Teachers put this idea to work all the time when they use analogies, which help us understand something new by relating it to something we already know about. Science textbooks, for example, usually compare electricity to the movement of water. Electrons moving along a wire are like water moving through a pipe.
So, understanding new ideas is mostly a matter of getting the right old ideas into working memory and then rearranging them-making comparisons we hadn’t made before, or thinking about a feature we had previously ignored.
This is why understanding is remembering in disguise. No one can pour new ideas into a student’s head directly. Every new idea must build on ideas that the student already knows. To get a student to understand, a teacher (or a parent or book or television program) must ensure that the right ideas from the student’s long-term memory are pulled up and put into working memory.
Even this is easy to say but hard to accomplish. Give a student an explanation and a set of examples, and they probably still don’t understand right away. Even when students “understand,” there are really degrees of comprehension. One student’s understanding can be shallow while another’s is deep. Second, even if students understand in the classroom, this knowledge may not transfer well to the world outside the classroom. That is, when students see a new version of what is at heart an old problem, they may think they are stumped, even though they recently solved the same problem. They don’t know that they know the answer! I elaborate in detail on these two issues – shallow knowledge and lack of transfer – in my book.
Tomorrow: In defense of practice
Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009) from which this post was adapted.
For all I know, maybe you’ve it on “the answer.” But all I know is that your expalaantion make more sense out of the world I see than anything else.
I’ll need to let things sink in more, but I’ve got a couple of questions. How does your explanation fit with Jacob Lehrer’s book that was discussed on C Span.
Secondly, you wrote favorably about the explanation that aleination from Nature is a problem.. Is our greater problem in our digital age the aleination from nature, mechanics, and other tangible systems? (memories from misplanting the corn or properly diagnosing a problem with the tractor used to give the concetret memories for other understanding?) Are we dealing with an educational equivilant of people using credit and debit cards going more into debt? As we move into a world that’s more abstract, we needed beter more intensive parenting, but we got the opposite. I’ll have better questions as your posts sink in.
John
I’ve never heard of Jacob Lehrer. I have heard of CSPAN. . .
I wouldn’t say that I’m on board the nature train. In a previous post I wrote that (to my surprise) there is some effect in a couple of studies showing that exposure to Nature gives a (probably brief) boost. Given the modest size of the boost I would say that lack of exposure to Nature is a small part of the problem.
I am enjoying your book and laughing as I ponder! I believe I must be a bit of a contrarian, because whenever you hint that a problem might be boring or difficult, I tackle it right away. Thus I was puzzled by the code on p. 86; it seems the word “euman” follows “human.” What is “euman”?
Your arguments about stories and repetition make sense to me. I am also intrigued by the Einstein quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge” (pp. 20, 35) and related quotes (p. 35). You show how they are wrong, and I ask myself: why do so many highly intelligent people downplay the value of knowledge at all? Why does it seem to them that schooling has little value next to imagination and creativity? Besides bad school experiences, what is going on here?
Well, there are some, just as bright, who will say that any great accomplishment is 99% hard work and 1% ability (or something like that). A statement along those lines has been attributed to Beethoven, I think. And in any case brilliant people get quoted in off-moments, and their statements should be taken with some spice.
Beyond that, I suspect that people often forget their indebtedness to knowledge. Suppose they make a discovery that casts into doubt what they were taught before. They conclude that what they were taught was bunk. But they forget that that very bunk made the discovery possible–that there could be no debunking without the bunk. (Not that knowledge is bunk–I mean that the very limits of schooling give us something to work with.)
Mark Twain (whom you also cite) is famous for his quote “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” But that doesn’t mean the schooling was worthless or that it had nothing to do with his education. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck, Tom, Jim, and others grapple constantly with what they learned in school, read in books, or heard others tell. Sometimes they dismiss it; sometimes they follow it to the letter; sometimes they mix it up; sometimes they argue with it; sometimes they find truth in it; sometimes they do several at once. Their lives and their thinking are all the more interesting as a result. Without the learning and the books, they would have no structures to contend with, no tales to contrast with their own, no paradoxes to resolve.
Diana Senechal
Lehrer used a case study of a British radar officer during the 1st Gulf War who became a hero for shooting down two Iraqi Sidewinder missiles seconds before they hit an American ship. They were following the flight path of American fighters and the officer couldn’t say why he feared they were missile. The British studied his decision inconclusively. Then the Marines reconstructed his info and sure enough he had practiced watching american planes for weeks. Nobody had realized it but the was a small deviation from previous patterns. So he WAS using memory without knowing it.
I hadn’t read your statement on nature as a strong endorsement. But I keep thinking that the more isolated we come from the material world, the worse this problem occurs of kids not picking up the concrete memories. Just speculating of course. By the way I enjoyed reading your AFT Educator article in print today as opposed to on a screen.
When you refer to thinking do you only mean conscious thinking? I’m wondering if the difficulty is paying attention rather than thinking.
Diana–Believe it or not, I am without a copy of mine own book right now–gave ‘em all away–so I cannot do the decoding that you asked about. Thanks for your other observations.
John–The Lehrer study sounds interesting and def. fits with some laboratory data showing that people can acquire expertise without realizing quite what they know. (Other data show that this is not an efficient way to learn, however.)
PM–in this case, yes, I’m talking about conscious thinking. I’m not sure what you mean by “difficulty” in your second sentence.
This insight is dead on for much of what ails the education system. In her book on literacy (I Read It But I Don’t Get It), Cris Tovani argued for the integral importance of effective readers using background knowledge to make sense of new information. Thus, without those fundamentals of knowledge, nearly all learning becomes much more difficult. That one reason is why children of lower socio-economic status risk never catching up in school. It’s also why exit standards and K-12 vertical teaming are indispensable in a k-12 curriculum. This sort of insight and analysis must become part of a much larger discussion of school reform.
Ooops, somehow my comment ended up associated with the wrong blog entry. I had intended to comment on your “Why Students don’t like School” entry. To preserve the thread I’ll continuer here.
So I’ve distilled a number of your statements into: It’s difficult for brains to think. I’m also assuming that conscious thinking requires paying attention. And that paying attention is also difficult. So can we separate the difficulty of paying attention from the difficulty of thinking for conscious thinking? I’m particularly curious about this question because the results of unconscious thinking appear to come so automatically and easily. I’m discounting the conscious preparation stages as that also requires paying attention.
PM: I have been considering the attentional demand as part of the reason that thinking is difficult. So when I say thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain, I meant the attentional demand when I said “effortful.”
We also need to think about different aspect of attention. When I said “effortful” I really meant “demanding.” You can’t deploy attention elsewhere because it’s focused on the task. but that doesn’t mean that it is necessarily hard to focus attention on the task. (that is, you might be absorbed in it, and not be tempted to turn attention another way.)
I’m still not sure what you consider unconscious thinking. there are several ways that this term might be interpreted. . . .
I just meant thinking that was not having an active interaction with consciousness. For example if someone has an “Aha!” moment I’m assuming there was prior thinking happening that the person was not aware of.
I’m also interested in the ‘paying attention’ part of things. It seems that so many kids have ADHD or ADD, and I’d assume the 1st step would be paying attention to information at the source (i.e in the classroom) prior to the revision, practise, solving problems etc. etc. The act of conscious listening would allow memories and linkage already in existence to be ‘prickled’ and surely would speed up the whole process?
Conversely, could practise and repitition and focus on memorisation improve the circuits that help attention? I’ve heard of learning music for example being used as therapy for AD/HD.
That is why it is easier to gather knowledge in something that you really liked about because it makes you focus more.