The question of relevance.
What should be stored in LTM? Do we really need to learn the type of factual knowledge now taught in schools?
Some take the position that the education system places far too much emphasis on "knowing" facts and that this focus is both boring and detrimental to understanding and application. We think there are effective ways to evaluate such claims, but we also think some forms of criticism related to this issue are not soundly based. For example, you may have encountered what we have decided to describe as the celebrity endorsement approach. Perhaps taking the lead from the advertising industry, this approach uses the comments of famous "thinkers" to criticize educational practice.You may have encountered this approach in the form of posters with the image of a famous "intellect" and a quotation or alternatively as Twitter tweets passing a similar quotation on to followers. The underlying logic seems to be that if those with impressive accomplishments question the focus of education, the rest of us should do so as well. Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham offers a list of several such quotes (Willingham, 2009, p. 35), but also offers a detailed analysis of the importance of background knowledge for thinking and understanding. You probably recognize the following from his collection:
- Imagination is more important than knowledge. Albert Einstein
- I never let my schooling interfere with my education. Mark Twain
- Your learning is useless to you till you have lost your textbooks, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which learned by heart for the examination. Alfred North Whitehead
So, who really needs to know whether or not helium is one of the noble gases or which phylogenetic genus is thought to be descended from the dinosaurs? It is, for us, difficult to debate who needs to know a specific thing. Instead, we would propose asking whether or not students need to know any specific thing differs in subtle, but important ways from the question "Does learning, understanding and higher-order thinking depend on existing knowledge?" For us, the first questions concern the school curriculum. The final question concerns the nature of human cognition. Obviously, both general issues are important. However, our emphasis here is on the more general question of how the cognitive system functions because this topic would seem fundamental to whatever emphases school-based learning should address. While we are going to duck the issue of which knowledge is essential, we are willing to endorse the position that knowledge is essential.
The efficiency with which the cognitive system functions is very important. In defending the value of factual knowledge, Willingham (2009) makes a claim to the effect that the mind prefers to remember rather than to think. Obviously, if we know something we do not have to figure it out. Continuing this logic, if we know something we do not have to take the time and allocate the attentional capacity necessary for thinking. When factual knowledge is fundamental to any other cognitive function or skill, the inability to pull needed information from long term memory simply wastes the limited resources of working memory.
Secondly, understanding and new learning depends on what is already known. Factual knowledge and the existing connections among factual and other forms of knowledge provide the structure within which new experiences are interpreted. Both basic and conceptual theories of memory emphasize the value of connections among the components of stored knowledge and skills and the importance of finding connections between some component of this existing structure and new experiences for new learning. Part of the benefit here again relates to working memory capacity. When the framework exists for understanding new experiences less strain is placed on working memory in interpreting new experiences. Implicit in this focus on existing knowledge is the assumption that facts are more useful when connected to other facts and other memory components.
Another way to frame the position we are taking is to suggest that the more you know the easier it is to learn. The significance of this statement for educational practice is easily under-appreciated. In a system that continues to move forward and build on what is already there, the student who falls behind may encounter experiences that become progressively more discouraging. A great amount of research bears out the perspective we describe here. We will describe one study we find to be particularly persuasive. Recht and Leslie (1988) wanted to evaluate the relative contribution of reading skill and background knowledge as predictors of differences in what would be learned by reading a text passage. At first glance, this may seem like a silly comparison. Wouldn't you expect a measure of reading comprehension (reading achievement test performance) to be the best predictor of a measure of reading comprehension (how much is learned from reading a passage)? The researchers decided to conduct their study with middle school students and they decided to focus on knowledge of baseball. By giving a larger number of students pretests of both reading comprehension skill and baseball knowledge, the researchers were able to identify students who fell uniquely into four groups; low-ability/low-knowledge; low-ability/high-knowledge; high-ability/low-knowledge; high-ability/high-knowledge. All students were then asked to read an account of a half-inning of a baseball game. The amount of information retained from the story and the understanding of what happened in the story were then evaluated. Those with more knowledge learned more than those with less knowledge. Perhaps more surprisingly, "Students with high reading ability but low knowledge of baseball were no more capable of recall or summarization than were students with low reading ability and low knowledge of baseball" (p. 19). If you think carefully about this example the findings should not be that surprising. We use very specific factual information to understand our experiences; i.e., the content we read or events that happen to us. For example, a sentence describing a baseball game might state "With two outs and a 3-2 count, the runner on first broke with the pitch." A fourth grade student could read this sentence. However, it takes some existing knowledge of baseball before the sentence makes any sense. With more detailed existing knowledge, you may even be able to explain why a professional player would likely be yelled at by the manager if he did not behave in exactly this manner. If you are unable to explain why the player would be in trouble, we bet you can locate a classmate who will be able to help you understand.
What you know, both factual knowledge and explanatory models, plays an important role in interpreting descriptive information. So, we cannot claim that it is essential you learn any given fact, but facts in general are necessary for understanding and higher order thinking.
Why can't I just Google it?
We do recognize a somewhat different perspective that is now sometimes associated with the issues we raise here. This position suggests that technology can replace what was once expected of human memory. Why not just take advantage of powerful online tools and search for what we need to know when we need to know it?
First, let us say that online search, a topic we consider in depth elsewhere, offers great benefits to learners in school and out. Clearly, there is tremendous advantage in being able to locate things we want to know and either cannot remember or have not experienced and never knew. However, the new reality of being able to locate factual information when desired often does not negate the value of already "knowing". What we know influences the efficiency with which the cognitive system functions and what we know is critical to understanding and more advanced forms of thinking such as problem solving and reasoning.