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Ass-Kicking Email – Are You Learning to Pass Tests or Understand?
Hey,
Are you learning to pass tests or truly understand?
Imagine two students: Billy and Jill.
Billy wants to pass his calculus test, so he dutifully memorizes the
formulas and does the practice problems.
Jill also wants to pass, but is more interested in understanding
calculus. She believes it can be interesting, even useful. But,
only if she invests time to gather a deep understanding.
She doesn’t just look at the formulas, but where they originated,
how they are used. She tries to apply the ideas to other problems,
and sees if she can create questions she can answer with the new
mathematical techniques.
The day of the exam comes and a large chunk of the mark comes from
a word problem, phrased in a way that neither Billy or Jill have
ever seen before.
Who do you think will get the best grade?
—
Concepts Before Facts
One piece of advice I try to give students is to emphasize getting
the “big” ideas before trying to memorize all the details. There are
essentially two reasons for this:
1. Teachers care more about the big ideas, than the details.
2. With the big ideas, the little details are easier to remember.
I frequently get emails from students who claim that their mean
professor is forcing them to memorize all these useless facts for
a particular exam.
While there are exceptions, I’ve found that this is almost NEVER the
case. I’ve even taken classes where we were expected to memorize
article numbers for law documents and although it seemed
memorization heavy, the majority of testing still focused on whether
the students understood the broader concepts involved.
Details do matter. If you don’t know the periodic table elements, or
which events happened before others, you won’t get good marks.
However the beauty of holistic learning is that it makes learning
the details easier.
Once you invest in truly grokking the hard concepts, then it is
easier to remember the details because they FIT within that picture.
—
Please join us in the forums to post your trials and ask questions:
Best,
-Scott
Christina Glantschnig
This is so true.
I just got an A* on a microbial biochemistry exam which is graded pretty softly, even though the topic is hard and complex. As I’m planning to do a master’s degree in biochemistry, I really wanted to understand the topic though and studied as if my life depended on getting the concepts and contexts.
In the end, I wasn’t the only one who got an A (which is why others would say I could have studied 5 days less for the exam), but I was the only one who was actually asked further understanding questions by the prof that weren’t covered in the lecture, like e.g. “You are very intelligent, I’m sure you can infer an analogous conclusion here”.
He also asked me if I would come back to the institute for my master’s degree =)
So I proved to myself that biochemistry is actually something that besides memorizing pathways and details, allows free thinking and connection making in the broader topic; that I’m capable of that; and I left an excellent impression at my bc institute 🙂
Matthew Hutchison
I like this idea and appreciate the concept. What do you think you would consider the “big idea” of learning a language. Working with Japanese has come along slowly for me, but I have noticed some definite improvements. I know I need to put some more time into it but I’m also wondering if I’m using the best methods. Any suggestions?
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