Let’s be honest, how many times have you see seen students cheating on a test? Typing formulas into a calculator? Telling friends quiz answers?

Unfortunately, the reality is true that the education system, or at least in America, has been turned more into a system of only getting the grade, not actually learning the material.

In an article from The Atlantic,  a Pre-Calculus teacher talked about a class he had at the the beginning of the year. He asked the students what was the sine of pi/2. The students all knew the answer was 1, but they only knew that because of a  formula, not how the formula worked or why it was made.

Memorization allows students to answer questions and get the answers, but if you asked them why it works the way it does, many are left clueless. Memorization takes facts and spits them without any real background of the material.

Memorization is well-supported by many though. Many advocate that memorization is a stimulus to exercise learning through practice and that it helps students to succeed in school.

Going back to The Atlantic, Ben Orlin does an excellent job of explaining the two main ways that students try to learn material. The first way Orlin talks about is what he calls raw rehearsal. Essentially this is when students practice a vocab word for example for a period of time just for a test or some kind of exam and then forgets it as soon as the examination is over. This is short-term “learning.” The other way students try to memorize material is through mnemonics, those songs, acronyms, or other mental tricks to try to memorize test topics. This process helps to retain information longer, but there’s still no real learning involved.

Orlin did go onto explain that there are some methods that do help to learn materials. One way through repeated use. This is when a student practices and uses some topic over and over again without any initial effort to memorize it. It’s natural using the material over again and in turn it becomes something the student knows well. The other method is building. Building is using information and making a connection from it. For example, many students know what pi is (about 3.14), but actually seeing what formulas it’s in and learning more about why it’s that decimal encourages the student to understand its meaning AND relate it to new material.

One of the other reasons memorization is relied on comes from the teachers level. Ease of grading and creating shorter but much more frequent tests and quizzes encourages short-term memory and puts more pressure on the students to make the grade. Many teachers also advocate for cheat sheets allowing students to put down formulas. This doesn’t encourage learning, but rather having thorough notes.

Changing the education system requires people, money, and especially effort. Change doesn’t have to start large scale, but in small proactive amounts. An system based on memorization doesn’t offer students the key knowledge concepts that may be useful later in life when applying for a career because the main focus is on a letter grade, not the topic at hand.

Source:

Orlin, Ben. “When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 09 Sept. 2013. Web. 09 Nov. 2015.