| Willingham would be proud, as this is a recurring theme and a whole chapter in his book "Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom." He also made this case on this on his blog when responding to Andrew Hacker's ridiculous suggestion to change math so that you don't actually learn math: "The problem is that if you try to meet this challenge by teaching the specific skills that people need, you had better be confident that you're going to cover all those skills. Because if you teach students the significance of the Consumer Price Index they are not going to know how to teach themselves the significance of projected inflation rates on their investment in CDs. Their practical knowledge will be specific to what you teach them, and won't transfer. The best bet for knowledge that can apply to new situations is an abstract understanding--seeing that apparently different problems have a similar underlying structure. And the best bet for students to gain this abstract understanding is to teach it explicitly. (For a discussion of this point as it applies to math education in particular, see Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1996). But the explicit teaching of abstractions is not enough. You also need practice in putting the abstractions into concrete situations." Neither of us, though, can make the point as well as he does. In the book he explains what transfer is, as well as surface knowledge, deep knowledge, etc, and how an understanding of these concepts ca inform a philosophy of education and shape education practices. Everyone, read his book! If the title worries you that it's too focused on educators, then ignore the title. The content is applicable to anyone interested in learning at all, especially if you want to improve the way you learn. Obviously, I strongly recommend that book, but alternatively, he covers a lot of what's in the book in his articles[2]. </willingham_fan_boy> [1] http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/07/yes-algebra-i... [2] http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html |