Why Don't Students Like School: Chapter 4

“Why Is It So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?”

Excerpt From: Daniel T. Willingham. “Why Don't Students Like School?.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/SexLw.l

“The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is:
We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.”

Understanding Is Remembering in Disguise
“What do cognitive scientists know about how students understand things?  The answer is that they understand new ideas (things they don’t know) by relating them to old ideas (things they do know).”

“One principle is the usefulness of analogies; they help us understand something new by relating it to something we already know about. ” 
i.e storytelling

“Another consequence of our dependence on prior knowledge is our need for concrete examples.”

“It’s not the concreteness, it’s the familiarity that’s important; but most of what students are familiar with is concrete, because abstract ideas are so hard to understand.”
This is exactly why I advocate using Undergrad Teaching Assistants in my class.  They let me know if the examples used in the lectures are "too out there" for the students in the class. Granted most Graduate students aren't too much older than the Undergrads, but they have a different perspective and they are taking more theoretical classes which can give them examples to use in class but may not be concrete enough for their students.

“So, understanding new ideas is mostly a matter of getting the right old ideas into working memory and then rearranging them—making comparisons we hadn’t made before, or thinking about a feature we had previously ignored.”

“No one can pour new ideas into a student’s head directly. Every new idea must build on ideas that the student already knows. ”

“To dig deeper into what helps students understand, we need to address these two issues. First, even when students “understand,” there are really degrees of comprehension. One student’s understanding can be shallow while another’s is deep. Second, even if students understand in the classroom, this knowledge may not transfer well to the world outside the classroom.”
This is where I struggle the most.  We teach how to do a screen print in Week 2, explain what it does, and then by Week 5 when the students have to do it for a project, they "forget" or can't transfer what we did in the classroom to their homework assignment.  I'm working on this by starting each project in class in a flipped classroom model.  IMHO flipping the classroom helps with getting things out of long term memory into working memory.

Why Is Knowledge Shallow?
“Rote knowledge might lead to giving the right response, but it doesn’t mean the student is thinking."
BUYA! This is my quote of the day! Students may be comfortable with technology but are they actually thinking about technology and how to use it effectively.

“Rote knowledge (as I’m using the term) means you have no understanding of the material.”

“Much more common than rote knowledge is what I call shallow knowledge, meaning that students have some understanding of the material but their understanding is limited.”

“A student with deep knowledge knows more about the subject, and the pieces of knowledge are more richly interconnected. The student understands not just the parts but also the whole. This understanding allows the student to apply the knowledge in many different contexts, to talk about it in different ways, to imagine how the system as a whole would change if one part of it changed, and so forth. ”

“In addition, the student would be able to consider what if questions...”

“They can think through this sort of question because the pieces of their knowledge are so densely interconnected.”

“Thus deep knowledge means understanding everything—both the abstraction and the examples, and how they fit together. ”

Why Doesn’t Knowledge Transfer?
“If someone understands an abstract principle, we expect they will show transfer. When knowledge transfers, that means they have successfully applied old knowledge to a new problem."

“When we read or when we listen to someone talking, we are interpreting what is written or said in light of what we already know about similar topics.”
This is what makes teaching at a University so difficult. Students coming from all over the world,all with different educational experiences and interpreting based on what they already know. I suppose this could be an argument for a "common core curriculum" (for lack of a better term) across the world, BUT there's that pesky "interpretation" piece.  No matter if there was a worldwide "common core curriculum" each and every student is going the make his/her own interpretations.

“The surface structures of the solved textbook problem and the new problem are different—one is about a hardware store’s inventory and the other is about cell phone plans—but the student knows he should disregard the surface structure and focus on the deep structure."
This is a question for the Math people... Are too many word problems the problem in getting the structural information or formulas into long term memory? Are students too focused on the semantics that they aren't understanding the structure of the math problem.  Just food for thought :)

“In other words, it’s a mistake to think of our old knowledge transferring to a new problem only when the source of that background knowledge is obvious to us.”

Implications for the Classroom
To Help Student Comprehension, Provide Examples and Ask Students to Compare Them
Make Deep Knowledge the Spoken and Unspoken Emphasis
Make Your Expectations for Deep Knowledge Realistic