A question for professors: When you were in college, what types of information do you remember remembering best?
It probably was not the information that your teachers had you memorize.
It was definitely not the questions such as “What year was the Magna Carta signed?” or “What are the names of the three main characters in the novel Moby Dick?” or even “How much salt, NaCl, is in the average adult human body?”
Perhaps it was questions such as “Explain the term photosynthesis.” or “Describe some of the events surrounding the creation of the Magna Carta and the significance of the document.” or “Why is the book In Cold Blood called a non-fiction novel?”
Memorized facts and figures simply do not stick with most students. Not in history courses, literature courses, science courses or any other types of courses. No student today really needs to know or to care when Beethoven was born. What should be known are characteristics about his life or of his music or the relationships of his music to the time period it was created.
For history courses, a prof need only look at the work of Ken Burns to know why memorization of dates and facts just isn’t the way for long-term learning about historical events to occur. Perhaps the memorization of terminology in various fields is sometimes necessary. But the memorization of many dates or long lists of facts just are not things that people remember for life. Or even until the end of the course.
Long multiple choice exams, as referenced earlier in this blog, are the sorts of exams that students cram for, memorize the material, and then forget much of the material the second the exam is completed.
And the World Wide Web, as every prof certainly knows, makes almost any type of memorization a moot point today.
The bottom line: teach students how to think, to describe, to reason and to understand, but don’t teach them that memorization is a significant part of the learning process.
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