This may sound like a silly question, but can you remember a single time in your 13 years of K-12 schooling when someone explicitly taught you how to learn new information in Social Studies, Science, Math or any other “content area” subject?

Teachers always told us what to learn: answers to questions, information for a test, formulas for a math problem. Sometimes, most often in math, they modeled how a particular answer mght be conjured.

But then we were on our own.

I remember once looking through a chapter in a biology book and thinking, “If I really wanted to understand this information and remember it for a long time, what would I do?”

Fortunately, I never had to figure that out because working through the workbook exercises and stumbling through the occasional quiz was all I needed to do get a low “B”—an acceptable grade in my family—and I had no use for the information once the unit was over.

I was lucky, though. I had an extremely good memory; still do. But most of my friends didn’t, and I watched them struggle horribly, especially in high school, to retain basic information in class after class. They weren’t goof-offs; they came to class and paid attention; they could read. They just couldn’t remember.

And nobody ever taught them how.

The closing thing I had to “memorization” approach was what you might call “read-listen-watch-remember.” But that’s sort of like say the best way to remember something is to have a good memory; not very useful to a general audience. I was fortunate; even the most useless things seemed to stick in my head pretty well. My only “study skill” consisted of reading something over again—workable for a biology chapter, but not exactly a good idea for 800 pages of David Copperfield. (And, by the way, along with reading over notes, reading over a chapter right before a test is known to be a highly ineffective way to prepare. You end up thinking you know something because you went over it but you may not know it all because you failed to pay attention to what was most important.)

You Must Remember This

Kids today have the same challenges but there’s probably more information to learn and, with testing, more pressure for them to learn it. I notice that teachers are going heavy on the worksheets, quizzes, and reading assignments. “Read-listen-watch-remember” is probably still the best shot many kids have.

But it’s really no shot at all, and it’s far from the best shot we can give them.

Content acquisition is a big deal these days. Used to be we simply accepted, as a statistical reality, that large amounts of the information teachers transmitted to students would be lost. We were right about this. Now, however, this statistical assumption shows up in test scores so we worry about it more. But we still don’t do much about it.

It’s natural when we’re under pressure to do the same things we used to do, but to do them a little harder, a little faster, a little longer, or a little more often. Sometimes this works—for a while. But often it doesn’t. Often it just digs us deeper into the same hole. As challenging as it is, we usually have to do something different if we want to get a different result.

Never Out of Date

Before we rearrange the “tried and true” methods of American education, let’s get a sense for the scope of the problem to be solved. Prior to the era of testing, it was perfectly acceptable for schools to allow large percentages of kids to avoid learning. Almost a third of our kids drop out of high school now. A couple of generations ago, that number was probably a little higher. Think, too, about the “almost dropouts”, the kids who graduate with grade point averages below 2.0. How much do they retain from each of their classes?

Today our goals have, thankfully, shifted. We hold much higher expectations, both for what we will teach, and for what will be learned. Simply put, we expect literally millions more kids to acquire significantly more content than we used to. This is the content acquisition problem in American education—and we’re not solving it very effectively.

The Fundamental Things Apply

School may have changed a bit over the last 30 or 40 years, but kids’ brains and the information we try to cram into them probably hasn’t. There are fundamental ways most of us acquire new knowledge and those ways probably won’t change any time soon. If we want to solve the content acquisition problem, we can start getting serious about solving it by understanding how human memory works.

We could think of learning something new in school as a three-step process: understand, apply, memorize. Understanding comes first. It’s certainly possible to learn things we don’t understand, or things that have no meaning for us, but it’s harder, and we hope this isn’t the case for kids in school.

Intuitively, it seems like best ways to help kids understand things would come from the best lessons, given by the best teachers, using the best teaching techniques. That helps. But even the best teaching in the world isn’t as powerful as the knowledge kids bring with them.

Understanding something new is a lot easier if you understand something similar already. This is one reason why kids who get A’s tend to keep getting A’s and kids who get C’s tend to keep getting C’s. The A kids bring thorough knowledge from past learning opportunities to new ones. The C kids bring a partial understanding at best, and therefore have a tougher time filling in the gaps between what they know and what they need to know.

This simple idea, that prior learning is probably the greatest determiner of future learning, should guide us in much of what we do.

As Time Goes By

We tend to take our grades along with us as we go through school. Kids who get C’s and D’s are often tagged as being lazy or unintelligent. But in many cases, they just didn’t understand certain things in the past, and now they don’t understand certain things in the present. This makes learning new things so difficult that it is either exhausting (a common source of the “laziness” perception) or impossible (a common source of the “unintelligent” perception).

There are two things we’re not doing now in American education that we absolutely must do to solve the content acquisition problem: offer children a coherent curriculum and intervene with much more urgency when kids have trouble understanding important things we know they’ll need later.

Curriculum standards should help the curriculum problem, though they won’t solve it. And one very common teaching practice must change. Ironically, this is the practice of “teaching the standards”. We have tended to take the notion of standards and turned it on its head.

In classrooms all over the country, teachers proudly display the standard they are teaching at a given time. Unfortunately, we don’t teach standards, we teach students. The standard is a learning target, not a teaching target—a learning target that depends a lot more on what kids have already learned than on what want them to learn as expressed in the standard.

Often, teachers will launch into a series of standards-based lessons with little regard for where their kids are relative to the standard they are trying to master. Rather than “teaching the standards”, we must teach our students how to meet them. When gaps in prior knowledge are significant, this can be very hard for both teachers and students.

It’s Still the Same Old Story

Just as important as a coherent curriculum is the fact that kids actually learn what’s in it. We are still far too casual in most schools about kids whose performance will likely leave them unable to be successful when the information they haven’t learned is required of them again.

If a student gets a C in Algebra I, what is the likelihood that he or she will do better in Algebra II? This is not an idle musing, but a testable proposition. Every high school has grades for every class taken by every kid. Look at the distributions. Determine the probabilities. Then consider what it means to fall behind, even just a little bit, in math.

Go back even further into middle school and trace the grades within a subject from there. Even if the curricula between middle and high school are poorly coordinated, you’ll still find that results at previous grade levels (a measure of prior knowledge) are eerily predictive of results at future grade levels.

So consider this: when we “let” kids get C’s and D’s in one class, especially early in their school career, there is a significant probability that we are condemning them to years of future academic failure. Every school should know this probability for every group of students in every core course. But more importantly, they should do something about it.

We have to intervene with extra help for kids at the first signs of struggle. The intervention must be focused and it must be thorough. That is to say, we can’t intervene to help a struggling 5th grade math student and then just say, “Times up! Run along to middle school. Don’t forget your locker combination.” Interventions must be swift and successful. And everyone involved must understand the stakes.

A Case of Do or Die

Now that we understand the stakes of not knowing something, let’s think about improving kids’ understanding. Again, inspiring teachers with amazing lessons and activities go a long way to helping kids improve their understanding, but let’s consider this more generically.

All learning happens in the brain, so it’s good to keep the brain in mind (pun intended). The brain likes to learn the same thing in different ways. At a rudimentary level, you can learn a shape faster by studying it from different angles. Of course, this was handy for our ancestors if they encountered a shape (like the proverbial Saber-Toothed Tiger) more readily regardless of where it appeared in their field of vision and took appropriate action more quickly.

So one thing we need to do is give kids different ways of learning the same thing. Unfortunately, we tend not to do this. Rather, we do the opposite. We see that kids are struggling with times tables on those famous “60 problems in 60 seconds” tests and so we have the kids take more of these mile-a-minute-math tests.

We do the same thing with flash cards, worksheets, textbook chapters, and most traditional study aids—if you look at most published educational materials, you’ll notice that repetition is the over-riding theme; this is not what they brain wants; it induces boredom, which reduces attention, which increases errors, which degrades memory. As a famous physicist said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” This is often what we do to our kids in school.

Giving kids different ways to encounter and apply new information is vital, but it’s not the only thing we have to do. People who really know things well can reason with them and about them. That is, they can use this information to form original thoughts and they can validate that their thoughts are correct (or at least know how they might not be).

So imagine studying the origins of our nation. You study The Mayflower and The Pilgrims and learn that some Europeans came to our shores for religious freedom. But you also study Jamestown and learn that some came to make money.

If you study other groups, can you find connections between the desire for religious and economic freedom? Can you use these “themes” of our history to pluck out other examples? Have their been times when these ideas have come together? Or when they’ve conflicted? As you continue to study, will you be able to explain how these two freedoms, and our desire to live them out as fully as possible, have shaped the development of our nation?

These are just examples of deductive and inductive reasoning based on themes. But when we work with kids this way, we increase their understanding of facts through application. The “themes” serve as different ways of organizing events. American history could be reduced to names, dates, places, events, etc. We could put it into a big long list and give it to kids. But those events would be easier to remember if we developed simple applications, like themes, to reorganize them and let kids look at them from more than one perspective. We can ask kids to apply many kinds of information in many different ways. To the extent that the application involves applying individual attention, purposeful thought, and conscious reasoning, most kids will tend to understand it better.

On Thursday, I will go into the solutions for getting kids to memorize their lessons better.