How Knowledge Helps
Article: How Knowledge Helps
Author: Daniel T. Willingham
Article Reading Time: 20 minutes (11 pages)
"It's true that knowledge gives students something to think about, but a reading of the research literature from cognitive science shows that knowledge does much more than just help students hone their thinking: It actually makes learning easier. Knowledge is not only cumulative, it grows exponentially. Those with a rich base of factual knowledge find it easier to learn more - the rich get richer."
Summary
This article looks at the importance of knowledge in learning. It breaks down the importance of knowledge into two distinct areas, each of which has several subsections.
1. How Knowledge Brings More Knowledge
"All students will learn more if they have greater background knowledge"
This section looks at how knowing things actually makes it easier to learn more new things. It splits the learning process into three steps, and discusses how knowledge helps in all three of these stages. The three stages are:
a. How Knowledge Helps You Take in New Information
"…when reading unfamiliar texts, subjects more often reread parts of sentences and they more often looked back to previous sentences…processing is slower when reading about something unfamiliar to you."
b. How Knowledge Helps You Think about New Information
"Poor readers with a high knowledge of baseball displayed better comprehension than good readers with a low knowledge of baseball."
c. How Knowledge Helps You Remember New Information
"it is easier to fix new material in your memory when you already have some knowledge of the topic [to attach it to]"
Each is clearly explained, with examples to demonstrate what the author means, and exactly how having more knowledge helps students learn more.
2. How Knowledge Improves Thinking
"A recent meta-analysis evaluated the results of 40 experiments that studied ways to improve students' scientific problem-solving skills. The results showed that the successful interventions were those that were designed to improve students' knowledge base."
The author then goes on to look at how having a good breadth of knowledge helps us think and solve problems, again splitting this into two distinct ways in which knowledge helps us think.
a. How Knowledge Helps You Solve Problems
"If you don't have sufficient background knowledge, simply understanding the problem can consume most of your working memory, leaving no space for you to consider solutions."
b. How Knowledge Helps You Circumvent Thinking
"For many problems, the expert does not need to reason, but rather, can rely on memory of prior solutions."
Again, explanations of the research are provided, and concrete examples are used to demonstrate how knowledge helps thinking.
3. Knowledge in the Classroom
As an aside the author links to a sidebar which looks at implications for the classroom. These are split into four broad categories:
a. Facts should be meaningful
"Teachers should include opportunities for students to learn new material about the world and connect it to prior knowledge wherever possible."
b. Knowledge acquisition can be incidental
"Teachers can also look for extra opportunities to provide incidental learning opportunities for their students, for example, by using a vocabulary word that the students likely do not know, but the meaning of which is deducible from the context of the sentence."
c. Not all knowledge needs to be detailed
"the knowledge required to increase reading comprehension is often fairly superficial…deep knowledge is needed to attain the benefits related to thinking such as the recognition of a chunk"
d. Knowledge learning should start early
"Building a store of knowledge works like compound interest - it grows exponentially…once children fall behind their peers, it becomes increasingly difficult to catch up."
My Reflections
One of the examples early on really emphasizes the importance of knowledge in reading:
"John's face fell as he looked down at his protruding belly. The invitation specified 'black tie' and he hadn't worn his tux since his own wedding, 20 years earlier."
There are a lot of inferences we make from this text, which are not explicitly stated, such as John being concerned his tuxedo won't fit. This clearly has implications for when we first introduce concepts to students, and shows that we need to be aware of what students know already, as any gaps can lead to them not understanding what we are teaching them.
In particular, if students cannot even understand what they are being asked to do, how are they supposed to do it? Even if they are able to understand, if this requires them having to think deeply about the question, they may have used all their working memory and so are unable to then actually solve the problem. This is perfectly demonstrated in a later example about Himalayan Tea Ceremonies.
The second takeaway for me is the interconnectedness of knowledge. Having knowledge helps you learn more, in part because you are able to "chunk" the new knowledge to old knowledge. Again the importance of prior learning cannot be understated. But what do we as teachers do to help students make these connections? Perhaps drawing explicit parallels between the new content and their prior knowledge would help students remember the new content.
Finally, the main point of the whole article is one which I think we as teachers need to be very aware of. Knowledge grows exponentially. Not only do the rich get richer, but the rich get richer more quickly. What can we do to help those who start with less knowledge in the first place? How can we help them catch up if their peers have all the advantages? Not questions I have an answer to, but something we should all use our knowledge to think deeply about.