Cartoon © Phil Watson. Used with permission.
An all-or-nothing person; you know the type. Everything is black-or-white and it’s their way or the highway. As coaches, they may rack up a few W’s in the win column but as educators and leaders, they lose sight of how effective learning happens. The all-or-nothing believers and debaters in education are blind to what works in learning because they refuse to see the different shades of gray between their black-or-white ways of thinking. Education is all about the gray matter. The science of learning is in their blind spot. Two of the biggest blind spots in education are testing and memorization.
The two all-or-nothing education camps on testing that garner the most attention in social and traditional media are those who believe standardized tests are important for academic achievement as well as accountability and should be administered every year (i.e., the No Child Left Behind advocates) and those who believe there should be no tests (i.e., the Free School movement). Recent studies on testing, however, demonstrate that frequent low-stakes testing (a.k.a. quizzing) timely spaced so that students begin to forget is the most effective way of making information “stick” in their minds (it is called spaced learning). It is not one big test to prepare for every year and it is not zero testing that help students learn but the counterintuitive idea of “forgetting to learn” with frequently spaced quizzing that advances academic achievement. It is the blind spot in our educational policy debates that can help us paradoxically see the most effective learning strategies for our children, if we would only turn around or turn a few research pages to see them.
When it comes to memorization or knowing facts, the blind spot of the all-or-nothing schools of thought should be called the Goldilocks Effect: it is not all memorizing and it is not zero memorizing but ‘just’ the right mixture of memorizing and recitation that helps a student learn. Several new books on the science of learning recommend splitting a student’s time for acquiring new facts into thirds where one-third of the time should be devoted to memorizing and two-thirds to reciting the knowledge. A common theme in many of the books echo neuroscientist W.R. Klemm’s Mental Biology mantra: “the more you know, the more you can know.” As Ian Leslie points out in Curious:
“Learning skills grow organically out of specific knowledge of specific domains—that is to say, facts…The wider your knowledge, the more widely your intelligence can range and the more purchase it gets on new information. This is why the argument that schools ought to prioritize learning skills over knowledge makes no sense; the very foundation for such skills is memorized knowledge. The more we know, the better we are at thinking.”
Knowing facts and learning go hand-in-hand and are mutually supportive. The all-or-nothing types are fostering a false dichotomy between knowledge and learning.
The science of learning is showing education leaders and policymakers where to look but they are implementing education policies as though they are, in the words of a Thomas Dolby’s 1980s song, blinded by science. If education is about learning (as it should be), then the science of learning should be informing policy. The fields of neuroscience and education have combined to form the emerging field (26 years old) of neuroeducation (a.k.a. educational neuroscience) that is not only revealing the blind spots of our educational system but is also providing ideas of how we should address them. The all-or-nothing schools of thought can only overcome the science of learning by ignoring it. The all-or-nothing crowd might want to try all-for-one and one-for-all.
BOOKS & ARTICLES:
Amy Adams, “Stanford Researchers Bridge Education and Neuroscience to Strengthen the Growing Field of Educational Neuroscience,” Stanford Report (November 21, 2014).
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (New York: Random House, 2014).
Benedict Carey, “Studying for the Test by Taking It,” The New York Times (November 22, 2014).
Paul A. Howard-Jones, “Neuroscience and Education: Myths and Messages,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience (October 15, 2014).
W. R. Klemm, Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014).
Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
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