Two of the Biggest Myths in Education

Myth 1: Understanding amounts to something other than memory. Myth 2: Sudents can perform high-level skills without mastering low-level component skills.

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Two of the biggest myths in education:

• Myth 1: Understanding amounts to something other than memory.
• Myth 2: Sudents can perform high-level skills without mastering low-level component skills.

Here’s the thing.

When you have a deep understanding of something, it just means you have more info in memory and it’s connected up in a way that makes it easier to activate & retrieve.

(Or “reconstruct” if you’re one of those people who gets triggered by the word “retrieve.”)

You also have a limit to how much mental effort you can put forth to intentionally activate info and maintain that activation. It’s called your working memory capacity (WMC).

When you’re trying to perform a task and the necessary activation takes more effort than your WMC allows, you just can’t do the task.

The solution is not to put forth more effort. That’s like telling somebody who can’t reach a shelf “just try harder to grow taller.”

Rather, the solution is to make the component info (i.e., the “building blocks”) easier to activate. Which is accomplished by training its retrieval process.

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