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Why Memorizing is Ineffective

  Sean Hitchings        2011-11-19 02:13:41       3,981        0    

The information-age has burst into life, creating a wake of social change. Young people are growing up faster and more sophisticated, as raw information, tailored-entertainment, and branded-marketing are streamed into their rooms. But this technological exposure has not necessarily made them savvier or more capable of handling tomorrow’s challenges.
The debates in public education over “school-choice” and standardized testing have missed the far more important issue. The real choice Americans face is whether students continue to learn only through memorization or whether they begin to develop higher-level thinking skills like conceptual thinking, analytical reasoning, inductive reasoning, creative problem-solving, and most especially, how to learn.
The tragedy is that students who learn by memorization are rewarded in the short term, but rarely develop the higher-level thinking skills that are becoming prerequisites for success in the knowledge economy. Students who do not learn through memorization are often left frustrated, left behind, or left out of higher-education altogether.
The Damage Caused by the SAT
For many students, the SAT is the first situation where memorization and pattern-thinking falls short. Students can be rattled by this experience, as they have been told they are good students. This places their beliefs about themselves and their high expectations in conflict with their experience. This has consequences beyond the SAT as these students start to believe they are "not good test takers," which impairs their future success.
(This does not mean that the SAT is measuring conceptual or higher-thinking skills, only that it is designed to run counter to students’ habits of pattern-thinking. The SAT has largely succeeded in suppressing score inflation through the years, despite the greater preparation that students are undertaking for the SAT.)
The Paradox of Grades
There is an awful paradox at the heart of our educational system: most students cannot afford to risk real learning in school. The pressure to gain grades has become so intense, and other incentives have become so palpable, that students are compelled to focus on grades rather than learning.
Many people assume that if you receive an "A", then you have mastered the material. This assumption depends on whether the grading system is geared towards measuring a students' learning or whether it is geared towards measuring their ability to restate facts. Unfortunately, very few teachers have the time, the opportunity, or the ability to design a class that measures learning and conceptual thinking. In practice, most teachers do not ask open-ended questions with many possible responses, instead asking closed-form questions with one correct response. No test can cover all the facts in a given topic, so the teacher must decide which facts to test. Homework and tests then become exercises in fact-finding, instead of yardsticks to measure students' progress as they integrate facts into larger concepts.
Knowing facts is important, but it is not synonymous with reasoning. After all, one can have an encyclopedic recollection of facts and still lack the reasoning skills to integrate these facts into a coherent understanding. Unfortunately, the curriculum and practices in most high-schools lead to short-term cognition, at the expense of conceptual understanding.
The goal of learning is then shifted from developing understanding to finding the information that the teacher wants. By playing this game of fact-finding, students know they will receive high grades. And by the same token, it doesn’t take many semesters of poor grades for students to give up their own nascent understanding in favor of meeting teachers' expectations, so they can regain approbation from teachers and parents. After years of conditioning, students become habituated to this process and start to learn only the facts that they think will be tested. Tackling complicated problems—without a certain result—appears inefficient, if not counterproductive.
This paradox is further compounded by the time-pressure that most students are under, as they are in school for seven to eight hours a day, work or play sports, and still must complete their homework. The natural consequence is for students to take every short-cut imaginable when studying—to the point where they will not have time to read the entire book, learn the math concepts, or contextualize the facts that they memorize.
Some teachers are aware of this problem, and try to reverse these trends by making their classes so hard or so open-ended that students don't even know where to begin. This approach backfires as students' motivation flags and they stop caring, and may eventually stop trying.
Some students are aware of this and know they are spoon-feeding a teacher what he/she wants to see, instead of offering original work. But most students are not aware of what they are being asked to do; they just know it is boring. Over time, bored students lose their motivation to learn. Indeed, even the word "learning" starts to have such negative denotations that they eschew it in any form.
It is no wonder then, that students lose their enthusiasm and motivation to learn. From their perspective, learning means rehashing the known, instead of an exploration into the unknown. Alfie Kohn, a well-known education expert, does a wonderful job exploring the emotional and psychological implications of achievement-oriented grading.
An inverse relationship starts to manifest between academic success and learning: those who succeed academically cannot reason independently, and those who can think independently cannot succeed academically. The evidence for this dichotomy is overwhelming as one listens to successful inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs when they discuss their conflicted experiences in the educational system. They will even go far as to state that their success has come despite of what they learned in school, rather than because of it.
Two Basic Types of Learning
As the psychology research shows, children begin their lives as incredible learners. When children matriculate through the educational system, two types of behavior result. The first is demonstrated by the student who excels throughout the educational system. These students can quickly learn facts, and repeat them at will. The second behavior is demonstrated by students who struggle through the educational system and have difficulty memorizing facts.
For students who are inductive learners, or who desire conceptual understanding, high-school can be painful and deflating. They are more likely to receive mediocre grades, followed by negative feedback from parents or teachers. This makes it extremely difficult for students to maintain their self-esteem, much less develop their minds. Many of these students are so damaged by the system of education that they drop out of higher-education. Yet, if these students can get through high-school with their sense of self intact, despite this negativity, they will often excel in their careers, where creative problem-solving is in high demand and short-supply.
For students who think deductively, or excel at pattern-recognition, high-school can be a breeze. But when they enter the workplace, they may experience unanticipated troubles, as they must tackle problems without clear-cut, factual answers. For example, when the next step on their project is uncertain, they are more likely to freeze or work in circles, instead of being able to work through the uncertainty, conduct problem-solving techniques, or come up with a creative solution. Given that this may only become apparent six years or more out of high-school, it can be very difficult for them to retrain their minds, so they can learn and work efficiently.
Losing Sight of the Goal
Policy-makers rightfully want to focus on outcomes. Well-designed standardized tests certainly have their uses, as they can test certain types of knowledge and even certain types of thinking. These these tests are weak indicators of learning, and may or may not reflect the development of thinking-skills. The problem with these tests is not that they are standardized, but that they aren't measuring whether students are good learners or whether they developing their reasoning abilities.
The essential problem is that policy-makers are confusing the goal with the means. By assuming that the symbol of success—a grade or a test score—reflects learning, decision-makers lose sight of the real purpose of education. Test scores might be one method to try to measure progress, but it should not be used as a substitute for real outcomes. The goal should be squarely focused on improving students' learning and cognitive abilities for success in the information-economy. The inability of our leaders to craft wise policy is hardly surprising, given that our leaders have been conditioned by this system of education. Nevertheless, it is crucial for our future political leaders to understand to not give up their own creative problem-solving abilities in favor of simplistic short-cuts.
Before society can improve the educational system, we need to have an honest discussion about the purpose of education, and whether society is willing to devote the resources necessary to create a 21’st century workforce. In actuality, there are plenty of resources available. For instance, the United States is spending over $400 billion on advanced tactical aircraft such as the Joint Strike Fighter and F-22, which have no real purpose after the fall of the Soviet Union. In comparison, the Federal government spends just $55 billion on education.
Most of the funding for education comes from property taxes, which totals $900 billion nationally. The total amount of money that the U.S spends on education is less than 6% of the United States' gross domestic product. Other nations are investing much more heavily in education. Singapore, for instance, is investing 20% of its federal budget on education, or 12% of its gross domestic product. This is part of the reason why the semi-conductor industry, the engine behind the information-economy, has moved from Silicon Valley to Singapore.
The current types of standardized tests are simple to implement and provide clear "results". The appeal of policies based upon test-scores is quite understandable within the larger political context. What our country needs is to find policy-makers who are comfortable moving into the complex world of education, where there are few factual answers, but a driving need for a holistic understanding of education.
Until the structural problems in education can be fixed, students will be forced to deal with this problem by themselves. Students need to be encouraged to grapple with the underlying concepts, supported through their learning-process, and dissuaded from learning through memorization. And since they are forced to take the standardized tests, they might as well use the opportunity to learn as much possible. OpenSourceTutoring has taken the first step forward by offering test-prep and other resources using more effective teaching methods than memorization. We hope to catalyze a broader curriculum reform throughout public education.

MEMORY  MEMORIZATION  INEFFECTIVE  CAREER 

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