Do today's students need to know anything? The role of facts in learning.

I've had a number of twitter conversations recently around the idea that we should focus on teaching skills such as creativity, rather than content. The idea is that we no longer need to teach students actual facts, (and they no longer need to remember facts), because information is so easily available on the internet. All they (and we) need to know is how to access it via Google, or Wikipedia.

This anti-knowledge meme is common in HE at the moment, but is not one that I agree with, at least from my perspective of learning and teaching science. There are three main reasons for this:

1. What to google?

My first problem is that you need to know what the question is, in order to google it. If you have ever experienced sitting through a talk that is completely over your head, you will know that it is extremely hard to even formulate a question that will help you to understand what has been said. Similarly, when you ask students if they have any questions about what you've just told them, and you get no response, you don't know if that is because the material was so hard that they don't know how to ask a question, or so easy that they completely understood it.

Let's look at a concrete example from the first year physics course at Edinburgh. This adapted from a question that is asked during lectures every year:

One mole of gas in a cylinder is compressed by a moveable piston. The work done on the gas by the piston is 2J. If the internal energy of the gas increases by 10J during the process, what is the heat transfer during the process?

If you didn't know how to solve this, what would you google? My bet is that someone who didn't know at least some basic facts about physics would find this hard. This leads to my second point:

2. Making sense of information needs some level of knowledge.

You might eventually find out that this is a first law of thermodynamics problem, and discover an equation relating work done, heat transfer and internal energy. But then what?

Even if you managed to find the first law of thermodynamics, to use it correctly requires some understanding of the variables involved. You need to know what a gas is, you need to know what J means (joules, a unit of energy), you need to know about energy as it is used in physics as opposed to colloquial everyday usage, and you need to know what a mole of gas is (or actually you need to know that you don't need to know that in this particular problem).

As Scott Young argues, facts aren't just important, they are actually vital for learning more about the subject, necessary for thinking about the subject, and building blocks for creativity in the subject.

This all leads to my third argument in favour of knowing facts:

3. Looking stuff up takes time

Someone with suitable skills could, I am sure look up everything necessary to solve the problem above. But how long would that take, compared to someone who had some facts stored in long-term memory?

My experience of an open book exam illustrates this point. (I should point out I am in favour of open book exams when students know how to approach them).  My first experience of an open book exam was during my first year studying Physics at Durham University. We were allowed to bring our own notes and text books into the exam and like many of my friends I didn't really know how to prepare for it. I decided to revise in exactly the same way that I had always done but not to bother memorising details, formulae etc. In contrast many of my peers took the view that they didn't need to revise at all because everything was in the notes. Unsurprisingly they didn't get very high marks. But it wasn't because they didn't have the skills to answer the questions (ok, it was partially because they hadn't revised) -  it turned out that their main problem was that they had simply run out of time.  They had spent so long looking through the notes to get the information that they needed (and hadn't memorised). While I also hadn't intentionally memorised anything, the act of revising meant that information was easily available when I needed it. In some cases this was because it was in long-term memory, in others because I could find information from my notes more quickly.

So how can we get a balance between learning facts and skills? I'm certainly not arguing for a return to a transmission based educational system where the memorisation of facts is central to learning.

But I do see skills and facts as inextricably linked.  For instance, in the example above, if you really understood the first law o f thermodynamics, and had used it to solve multiple physics problems, the likelihood is that the equation will have entered your long-term memory- you'll have learned it off by heart without really meaning to! In addition, if you really understood it you would make connections to other areas of physics – for example you might realise that it was a form of the law of conservation of energy (a central idea in physics). From this you could re-construct the equation without even needing to remember it.

In either case facts are an essential part of what it means to do and to learn physics, and without them skills are (nearly) useless.


Image by Tommy Ellis on Flickr (Creative Commons)

Do today's students need to know anything? The role of facts in learning by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.