Monday, November 15, 2010

Super Summary, Part 4, p. 86 - 126


Why Students Don’t Like School
by Daniel T. Willingham
Part Four, p. 86 - 126
 

    Why is it so hard for students to understand abstract ideas?  The author begins this section stating the fact that the mind prefers concrete ideas, and not abstract ones.  In fact, the title of the first chapter of this section just happens to be “Why is it so Hard for Students to Understand Abstract ideas?”
    The author states that we understand new ideas best by relating them to things we already know.  Our mind needs analogies, prior knowledge, and concrete (and familiar) examples to help understand abstract ideas.  The author then states that ‘understanding new ideas is mostly a matter of getting the right old ideas into working memory, and then rearranging them.’  
    The next section deals with the concept that knowledge is shallow, and that rote knowledge means there is no understanding of the material.  The opposite of this is when a student has deep knowledge, and understands not just the parts but the whole.  This is obviously harder to obtain than ‘shallow’ knowledge.  Again, concrete examples that activate prior knowledge will help the students attain more complete understanding of ideas.
    Transfer of knowledge is another challenge for the mind.  The author discusses ‘surface structure’, and ‘deep structure’ of particular problems that students solve.  ‘Surface structure’ deals with how the question is framed, and ‘deep structure’ deals with the steps that are needed to solve it.  If people concentrated more on the ‘deep structure’ of problems, abstractions would be easier to solve.
    Some suggestions that the author makes to help facilitate deep understanding include:

*Provide examples and ask students to compare them.
*Make ‘deep knowledge’ the spoken and unspoken emphasis.
*Make your expectations for deep knowledge realistic.

    Is the phrase ‘Drill and Kill’ accurate?  In many educational circles it seems to be considered just that.  However, the author states that ‘it is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.’  He gives examples such as practicing soccer skills over and over until they become second-nature, as well as algebra skills being dependent on knowing the basic math facts first.  The important point is that ‘practice enables further learning’.  Knowing which skills need to be practiced over and over, and which ones do not, is the important factor.  
    A person’s working memory capacity determines to a large extent the person’s reasoning ability...and working memory really can not be increased.  We can compensate for our ‘lack’ of working memory, however.  One of the easiest ways to compensate is to make certain skills automatic.  Things that are automatic (like tying our shoes, or driving) take up almost no room in working memory.  They become automatic by repetition, and that frees up more space in our working memory to solve complex problems.  Also, memory is more enduring when practice is spaced out over time (not ‘crammed’ in).
    Practice also makes memory last longer.  Studies have shown that we do forget fairly quickly what we have learned, but we do not forget everything...especially things that have been practiced repeatedly.  Higher-achieving students forget at the same rate as lower-achieving students, and both groups retain some of the memory even after many years.  But both groups do retain some information, even from skills that were not repeatedly practiced.
    The author’s emphasis in this fifth chapter is that repeated practice is necessary for certain skills, and that these skills ultimately help the mind do more with complex tasks.

3 comments:

  1. The transfer of knowledge discussion in this chapter was interesting to me. I am thinking that life experiences and maturity also play an important role for an individual to be able to transfer knowledge between similar concepts. I vividly remember trying to solve math story problems similar to the one the author used as an example. It was difficult for me and these types of problems frustrated to me because I could not "transfer the knowledge" easily.

    It seems the more experience you have with something, the easier it is to draw on past experiences to work through your current problem.

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  2. I think keyboarding is a good example of a skill that becomes automatic by repetition so that ideas can be expressed in more complex ways. When you begin using a keyboard, you spell out the words a letter at a time. But as you practice your mind “sees”, and subsequently types, words not letters. You are free from spelling out individual words and can write as you think. The words flow easily and you can create more complex written works.

    Learning a foreign language is the same way. When I took German in high school I remember I started out mentally translating each word to get meaning from a sentence, but eventually it clicked and I remember coming to the realization one day that I was thinking in another language.

    When I taught math, over half of my seventh grade students could not remember the multiplication tables that they had memorized when they were younger. I came to believe that was because they had not had enough practice using them to solve problems. Just the memorization wasn’t enough. They were missing the meaningful application of the facts they had learned. I would like to blame the use of calculators, but I still feel the problem is more complicated than that. After reading this section of the book, I feel that I have a better understanding of what my students were experiencing. If I teach math again in the future I think this knowledge could be useful.

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  3. As I was reading this chapter I wondered if we as teachers are focused to much on having children learn through exploration. If our minds are focused to work on the concrete and process what we already know, it seems to me we need to get as much information into children as possible. I can see the need for children understanding how math works, but if studies show our brains work best through practice perhaps we need to put more focus on repetition (drill). How many times have you needed to know a strategy to better understand a multiplication problem as an adult? Depending on what job you go into, the majority of us just need to be able to recall our facts or make good estimates. Just a thought...

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