Report: You Can’t Teach Skills Without Facts

Report: You Can't Teach Skills Without Facts

In today's digital era, we have become used to getting information at the touch of a button – and at lightning speed. This technique has proven to be successful with industries such as entertainment and food, but can it work with our education? School children are fast-moving on from conventional methods of learning in favour of a much quicker way of gaining information, such as through search engines like Google and Wikipedia. Ex-secondary school teacher Daisy Christodoulou feels that these modern methods will not work and that there are some facts you simply have to learn before you can progress any further. “The memory is vital for learning.” She said. “Modern education should learn that lesson. Those who know their times tables will find it easier to solve a maths problem [than those who just search the internet for the answer]”

Is the Old Way the Best Way?

According to her research 1/5th numeracy skills, a figure that is both shocking and worrying. “Everybody has a limited working memory, limited to a maximum of about 7 new items.” She explains in her film. If we try to memorise more than this amount we will become overwhelmed. For this reason we should not rely on just looking things up on the internet as we will only end up forgetting the information just as quickly as we received it. When we memorise things correctly we store them in our long-term memory and we then free up the space we had used in our working memory which can now be used to process new things, hence why we find it easier to solve numeracy questions when we have previously memorised the required formula. In the research carried out by Daisy Christodoulou she also found that many prominent educationalists and even government agencies were giving out advice that ran directly counter to the evidence she found. “Too often they would dismiss fact learning as being out dated.” She said. And it would seem that this is simply not true, there are many modern ways to engage of pupils will leave school with poor literacy and children and help them remember without having to resort to techniques that do not really work. For more information on this issue, and to watch the Daisy Christodoulou's film on this topic check out BBC's initial report.