Tuesday, September 17, 2013

In Defense of Facts: Students know too much, say science standards advocates

While most of us think that it is ignorance that needs to be stamped out, advocates of Kentucky's new unapproved and forcibly implemented science standards are targeting ... knowledge.

Just take a gander at the responses to my opinion piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal which were published on Monday. According to Brad Matthews, former director of curriculum and assessment for the Jefferson County Public Schools, one reason we need these unapproved and forcibly implement standards is to extirpate that bane of all modern permissivist educators: memorization.

"Science education has moved away from the memorization of many facts," says Matthews, "and toward understanding how the laws and principles of science are applied."

That's right: students have memorized too many facts. Their heads are bursting with scientific facts. There is not enough room in their tiny little brains for an understanding of how these facts should be applied because all the room us currently taken up by scientific facts which these students have memorized. There is simply no space in those fact-crowded little heads for scientific concepts.

The solution is obvious to people like Matthews: clear all that knowledge out of there so they will be able to apply the knowledge they will no longer have under these standards.

Just check out some of those Jefferson County schools Matthews had a hand in overseeing and you'll see the extent to which kids are overstuffed with memorized factual knowledge.

What exactly is it that modern educators have against memorized knowledge of facts? And why is it that they are always pitting facts against application and concepts? Is the possession of memorized facts really inconsistent with an ability to apply scientific procedures and an understanding of scientific ideas?

Since we're now abandoning memorization, we can apparently look forward to the prospect of Kentucky students knowing fewer facts than ever before.

What a relief.

10 comments:

Lee said...

Granted, it's just an analogy. But it has always seemed to me that memorization is to learning what calisthenics, running, and weight training are to playing football. Or basic training is to a military man. Or scales and arpeggios to a musician.

A necessary first step.

Maybe some educators don't like memorization because it makes it easier to teach what to think instead of how to think. You can teach the students the theory of your choice, without those silly facts getting in the way.

Singring said...

'What exactly is it that modern educators have against memorized knowledge of facts? And why is it that they are always pitting facts against application and concepts?'

The answers to both of these laughable questions are obvious:

1.) Modern educators have nothing against memorized knowledge.
(in fact, to play your favourite game: Where does Matthews say he's against students memorizing facts?)

2.) They are prioritizing cincept knowledge over facts (not 'pitting' one against the other) because there is only a limited amount of time availabe to teach.

So, if there has to be a choice, they would rather teach concept knowledge rather than factual knowledge because the latter an be obtained from textbooks within a few minutes. Concept knowledge is much, much harder to come by.

You demonstrate this every time you post one of your highly entertaining ruminations about science.

Lee said...

By the same token, maybe conservatories shouldn't teach scales and arpeggios. After all, there is only so much time for teaching, so we might as well skip these non-musical calisthenics and just teach the sonatas and concertos.

Singring said...

'By the same token, maybe conservatories shouldn't teach scales and arpeggios. After all, there is only so much time for teaching, so we might as well skip these non-musical calisthenics and just teach the sonatas and concertos.'

Obviously, teaching science is exactly like teaching arts, so it requires exactly the same teaching methods.

In fact, why don't we have music teachers write the science standards?

Lee said...

Of course it's something of an analogy, but only something of one, since we're talking about knowledge and mechanisms for learning.

I'm just not discounting the idea that memorization may be a fundamental exercise of thinking, even as scales are a fundamental exercise of playing an instrument or pushups a fundamental exercise of a particular sport.

I can testify that in my own line of work, a better memory would be of enormous help in what I do. Of course I can look up facts via Google, but that very act in itself can be disruptive of thought.

Singring said...

'I'm just not discounting the idea that memorization may be a fundamental exercise of thinking, even as scales are a fundamental exercise of playing an instrument or pushups a fundamental exercise of a particular sport.'

I have no doubts that memorization can serve an important purpose in learning and there are certain things one has to memorize, regadless of whether it is simply facts or certain concepts or processes that might be more complex.

And I really doubt that educators anywhere dispute that memorization can serve a purpose.

However, if there's only x hours of science teaching available per week, it is far more productive to teach students how something works rather than what it is called. The former requires much more thinking and reasoning and is often highly transferrable. The latter is none of the above.

I teach biology a a university for a living and if I had all he time in the world, I would love to have them memorize the latin names of the main orders of insects, for example, just as I had to during my degree. And we still give them credit in exams, for example, if they have memorized some of those orders.

However, given the time I have available to teach students - even at a university, where we can focus almost exclusively on a certain topic - I still would much rather spend most of my time teaching them general concept knowledge and process knowledge rather than what a specific organism is called, for example. They can look that up in two minutes in a textbook if they ever need to. They can't do that with concept or process knowledge.

'I can testify that in my own line of work, a better memory would be of enormous help in what I do. Of course I can look up facts via Google, but that very act in itself can be disruptive of thought.'

Again, I don't doubt that a better memory would be beneficial in most if not all professions. I know it ould benefit me immensely.

But again - science has become such a complex and expansive subject that we can hardly get through the basic concept knowledge in the time available. So if here is going to be a choice, it's going to be in favour of that and I welcome this kind of shift in emphasis in schools. Of course students will still have to memorize some basic facts, but it is no longer the emphasis.


Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

Good post. But I think there are two things you don't take adequately into account.

The first is that you are teaching at a university, not an elementary school. The needs of university students, who presumably have a large fund of background knowledge are very different from, say, a third grader who simply doesn't know much yet and is not quite at a stage of intellectual development in which he can understand abstract concepts.

Secondly, you seriously underappreciate the extent to which memorization is reviled by American public educators. I have been involved in education reform issues for over 20 years and the animosity toward memorization, drill, and practice is one of the most prominent features of the progressivist ideology that dominates education departments that produce all the teachers here.

Singring said...

Those are fair points, Martin.

However, I do think you give students less credit than they deserve. In fact, from what I've seen in university-level students it's precisely the lack of conceptual knowledge teaching in schools that makes it extremely difficult for them to excel at university. They come to university, often expecting the kind of highly prescriptive
and 'just the facts' teaching they get at school and struggle immensely when something different is expected at university. In fact most of our time is spent on weaning students off the expectation of having little bits of simple, uncomplicated knowledge spoon-fed to them. Once they get over that, however, they very much get into the spirit of thinking about concepts and complex processes, even at an early stage.

Granted, the issue might be a different one in the US and you obviously have a much better perspective on this than I do.

That being said, what I've read of the NGSS is more along the lines of what I would favour to see in schools. Concept-driven, but in a context that still allows students to learn specifics and facts based on the local curriculum.

For the record: I am not in favour of completely abandoning memorization or learning of discrete facts. Quite the opposite. But I don't see how the NGSS would do this and in many ways, I believe that learning facts in the context of a larger concept or process makes them much easier to assimilate and internalize, at least in my experience.

Lee said...

> I have no doubts that memorization can serve an important purpose in learning and there are certain things one has to memorize, regadless of whether it is simply facts or certain concepts or processes that might be more complex.

Then we are in substantive agreement.

Now the only thing left to do would be to quarrel over where the line gets drawn, which was not my goal.

Lee said...

> Secondly, you seriously underappreciate the extent to which memorization is reviled by American public educators.

Exactly. I've read about math teaching theories at the elementary levels where they did not even want to clutter the students' minds with having to memorize the multiplication tables.

I've also read that there are certain mathematical important concepts which, if someone doesn't grasp them by age twelve, will never be grasped. We don't like saying someone who is thirteen years old is already washed up, but it just might be that way.

By contrast, when I lived in Omaha, one of the local business giants was a hundred-year-old woman named Rose Blumkin, who had emigrated to the U.S. from Russia when she was very young. She started out as a teenager, selling carpet. She quickly made a name for herself because if you could tell her how large your house was, she could then, fast as a wink, tell you how much carpet you'd need and how much it would cost you. To the penny, with tax.

I'm pretty sure somebody had taught her the multiplication tables.

She kept getting promotions and eventually bought the store. She turned it into the Nebraska Furniture Mart, and it was the largest furniture and carpet store in America, at least for a while. She died, I think, at 103, a very rich woman. I remember seeing her at the store in her nineties, in her wheelchair, still selling carpet and still providing lightning-fast calculations.

She didn't do anything I couldn't have done much more slowly. But it's possible she didn't really think all that much faster than anyone else; maybe she had simply had arithmetic drilled into her at a very young age, to the point where she hardly had to think about it at all. And this gave her time to think about more important things.

I got a late start in the music field and the things I have to think about, other musicians just do without having to give it much thought. I suspect it seems paradoxical to some, but if you work harder earlier, I think it means you have to work less hard later on.