Stop with the Pyramid - Remembering is Sometimes "Higher" Than Understanding

As a teacher of 8th graders, I operate as a preparer - a trainer of students for high school.  They come to me as middle schoolers with middle school mindsets, but it is my job to morph them into high school students by the end of the year - mostly as it relates to study skills.  

They are used to pretty weak studying, and the techniques they have used in the past have brought them some degree of success due to the nature of the tests they have taken.  This is not a criticism of their K-7th grade teachers.  The tests they have been taking were age-appropriate, but they need to add tools to their toolbox.  While I devote some class time to giving study advice and test-taking advice, I also end up having a couple of dozen meetings with students after their first and second tests (and a few after the third when the ones who had thought it would go away if they ignored it realize that strategy isn't working).

During these meetings, I always start with the same question.  "What does studying look like for you?"  Ninety percent of the answers are, "I look over my notes" and "I re-read the chapter."  We talk about the ineffectiveness of that strategy and how their time would be better spent on retrieval practice.  I recommend flashcards as though I had stock in the index card companies.  Flashcards, however, are only good for what they are good for - information in which the answer is rather short.  So, this year, I added another question to this conversation.  "How do you prepare for the questions that are likely to be (or that your teacher has explicitly told you are) short answer or essay questions?"

Wow, did this question ever get me a lot of blank stares.  Most of the conversations sounded like this:

Me:  "Do you remember when I told you that this question about explaining inhaling and exhaling using Boyle's law would be on the test?"

Student:  "Kind of"

Me:  "Do you remember that I showed you the page number where it is explained and where the link to the video animation is?"

Student:  I guess

So, of course, we talk about the reason teachers tell you things and how, if I have gone to this much effort to make sure you have the resources to prepare for the question, you should take that seriously.  The most interesting conversation I had on this topic, though, came from a very conscientious student who did take the time to use her resources.  It sounded like this:

Me:  How did you prepare for the Boyle's Law/Breathing question?

Student:  I read the section and I watched the video you gave us.

Me:  Good start.  Did you do anything to make sure you remembered it?

Student:  I read it and I understood it.  I figured that would be enough.

That was a revealing answer, which I had never gotten before.  I asked a few more questions and advised her that next time, she should try writing out the answer like she would if it were on a test BEFORE she went and checked the video and the book page.  In other words, she should use the resources for feedback after retrieval.  Her answer then benefitted every student I met with afterward because I gave the same advice to them.

Later that week, I was relating this story to a colleague, and she said "That's interesting.  Understanding is considered a higher level thinking skill than remembering, but it didn't do her any good to understand it because she couldn't remember it."

If you aren't a teacher, you might not know the phrase "higher level thinking skill," but it comes from the misapplication of Benjamin Bloom's work.  He set out to identify different types of thinking.  His publishers put it into a pyramid diagram.  Teacher prep programs started using the diagram to press teachers into racing their way up to the top levels of the pyramid without recognizing that the lower levels are just as important and perhaps foundational.  (I like the wheel diagram to the left better because it doesn't imply a hierarchy.). You cannot engage in "higher level thinking" with things that are not in your brain.  If you can't remember it, it doesn't matter that you understood it.  If you can't remember it, you can't apply it, analyze it, or evaluate it.

Doug Lamov, author of Teach Like A Champion is a great Twitter follow.  Several weeks ago, he posted this.  "Retrieval Practice is the act of recalling previously encountered information into working memory, or conscious thinking. Brief spurts of Retrieval Practice help students solidify information in their long-term memories, and, importantly, understanding is not learning until it is encoded in long-term memory." 

Debates about pedagogy are everywhere - traditional v. progressive, explicit v. project-based, worked examples provided v. student-generated examples (a lot of ink has been spilled on these topics), but we would be wise to keep in mind Lamov's point.  It isn't learning until it is encoded in long-term memory.  So stop with the pyramid, and figure out what you want students to do with the knowledge they have.  It will guide your thinking about what is important to have memorized rather than make you look down on all memorization.