Memorizing and Knowledge, Part 1 of Many
Posted: July 22nd, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 3 Comments »
0. Dear Pru,
When I get home, I promise not to do any back-seat driving for at least a month. Maybe 2.
Not after experiencing taxi drivers in Nairobi. We love our drivers — Harrison, Same, Peter. But they believe it’s a sin to leave anything more than 6 inches of space between our front bumper and the car ahead. xo
Okay, now on to today’s topic.
1. Is knowing facts a good idea?
This is a point of controversy in edu-circles. I’ll return to this question a different day.
2. Kenyan 8th graders being able to pass KCPE — is that a good idea?
Yes. Nobody disagrees. Succeeding on this exam is necessary to attend high school. The majority of poor Kenyan children do not pass.
(Exam success does not guarantee high school — some families remain unable to afford it….as government schools here are not free, and private high schools are far more expensive that private elementary schools).
3. Do you need to know many facts to pass KCPE?
Yes. Again, not in dispute. So irrespective of your views on “knowing lots of facts,” it seems like a good idea for Kenyan kids to know lots of facts.
4. What is best way to know lots of facts? Does “memorizing” help?
I will devote several blogs to this in coming weeks.
a. Stories aid memory.
The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories-so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as “psychologically privileged,” meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material. I’m going to suggest that organizing a lesson plan like a story is an effective way to help students comprehend and remember.
b. Thinking aids memory.
I.e., forget about the virtues of thinking itself. Pretend for a moment you’re an intellectual Neanderthal, and all you cared about is memorization.
What’s the optimal way? In part, to include a lot of thinking.
I.e., who will memorize more stuff?
Kid A: Spends 100 minutes to memorize, using flashcards, giving himself quizzes, studying what she missed, etc.
Kid B: Spends 70 minutes using flashcards, 30 minutes engaging in thinking about the topic. Which obviously “wastes” time that could be devoted to memorizing.
I think up until about 2005 I believed: Kid A.
Now I will argue: Kid B. Dan W again:
The only quibble I have with Gove on this topic is when he says “Memorisation is a necessary precondition of understanding.” I’d have preferred “knowledge,” to “memorisation” because the latter makes it sound as though one must sit down and willfully commit information to memory. This is a poor way to learn new information–it’s much more desirable that the to-be-learned material is embedded in some interesting activity, so that the student will be likely to remember it as a matter of course.
c. Memory Palace
The answer lies in a discovery supposedly made by the poet Simonides of Ceos in the fifth century B.C. After a tragic banquet-hall collapse, of which he was the sole survivor, Simonides was asked to give an account of who was buried in the debris. My trainer and all the other mental athletes I met kept insisting that anyone could do what they do. It was simply a matter of learning to ‘think in more memorable ways.’
When the poet closed his eyes and reconstructed the crumbled building in his imagination, he had an extraordinary realization: he remembered where each of the guests at the ill-fated dinner had been sitting. Even though he made no conscious effort to memorize the layout of the room, it nonetheless left a durable impression.
From that simple observation, Simonides reportedly invented a technique that would form the basis of what came to be known as the art of memory. He realized that if there hadn’t been guests sitting at a banquet table but, say, every great Greek dramatist seated in order of birth — or each of the words of one of his poems or every item he needed to accomplish that day — he would have remembered that instead.
He reasoned that just about anything could be imprinted upon our memories, and kept in good order, simply by constructing a building in the imagination and filling it with imagery of what needed to be recalled. This imagined edifice could then be walked through at any time in the future. Such a building would later come to be called a memory palace.
There may be ways to help our kids use this in some way. I don’t know.
USA K-8 tests generally don’t require much long-term memory and don’t explicitly call for knowledge. There are “unit tests” — you learn about the Spanish-American War for a couple weeks, cram the night before, forget it the day after. Then the state exams like MCAS focus on math and English, not history and science. (I say “explicitly” call for knowledge because, per E.D. Hirsch, knowledge is implicitly important for reading comprehension on an English exam). So my background in memorization is limited. I need to learn more.
5. Short v Long
Can the KCPE facts live in a kid’s short-term memory (working memory), or must they live in long-term memory?
My early belief here is that short-term memory works well for a single exam with a modest number of facts to recall. For example, most of us used short term memory in school for a “unit test” — you’d cram a bunch of info about, say, the Spanish-American War, take the test, promptly forget. Rinse and repeat.
But I think long-term memory is more critical for a test like KCPE — 5 subjects in 3 days, covering a gigantic body of knowledge.
6. Is memorization/basic knowledge enough to succeed on KCPE?
Our team’s early answer is: no.
As we analyze the last 10 years of KCPE exams, we see many instances where a kid needs to recall the facts and then use critical thinking.
Memorization is a precondition, but not enough.
7. How might we distinguish memory and thinking?
More Dan:
First, imagine the world as a sort of river of external information constantly flowing into the brain—what color these letters are, the smell of your coffee percolating or the score of a game on TV.
Working memory, the part of the brain where awareness or consciousness exists, takes in all of that information. It feeds some of it down into long-term memory, which is sort of like a huge warehouse of factual knowledge about the world. Those facts can be both concrete, the colors of a stop sign, for example, or abstract, such as what the square root of nine equals.
Long-term memory, meanwhile, is also feeding other information back into working memory. And when that information meets the external information, knowledge is rearranged in new ways—thinking occurs. Knowing how to combine information and rearrange ideas is the key to successful thinking, Willingham says.
Great post. But here’s my question: What comes first, the facts or the thinking about the facts? Don’t we have to know facts before we think about them? If we are to think critically, the question is what do we think critically about? We sometimes forget that we live in a concrete, specific (i.e. factual) world, a world that includes books, ideas, history, schools, etc. We may want to organize and summarize those facts, which had been, up to about 50 years ago, one of the primary roles of a school. We used to think of this storehouse of fact (aka knowledge) as a wonderful thing. How our education system has sacked the storehouse is one of the great education stories of the latter part of the 20th century. Oh yes, and sometimes we forget that the thing itself (a book, for instance) came before the summary of the thing. So, let’s get back to a simple truth: knowing things is a good thing.
Good question. Let’s make it concrete. Today’s lesson is to teach some facts in science class about, say, light. The nature of light.
Do you open the lesson with any sort of question that catalyzes thought? “Why do you think XYZ happens?”
I would say, and here I’m parroting Dan Willingham, that if you get people thinking a bit, the advantage is that you can set up their memory to better retain the facts once delivered.
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