Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
So, to take an extreme example, if a student locked in an isolated sensory deriva-
tion chamber thinks that uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element, then
we might feel that justifies assuming the student “knows” that information. (This
ignores the issue of
how we know
what the student thinks: not a trivial consideration,
especially in this set of circumstances!) However, we might have less confidence in
thinking another student “knows” this same fact when they tell us this whilst read-
ing a chemistry book. Indeed, if the student is Chinese and is just learning to read
English, but has minimal English language comprehension, we might infer that any
“thinking” is at the level of converting text to verbal output, and does not justify
us assuming the student even “held the idea” during processing. My computer can
convert text into “speech” in a similar way, but I do not consider it to think.
Often, as educators, we are less concerned with what ideas might be expressed in
a specific unique context (such as when reading a pertinent text), but what ideas are
likely to be reproduced reliably in a variety of contexts with limited environmental
support. By the latter, I mean that educators traditionally judge student knowledge
in formal education by what they express under test conditions where they have no
access to reference materials and are not allowed to confer with others. We want
to know what they remember: what they have “held in memory”. Whilst such test
conditions are seldom authentic reflections of how knowledge is applied in real life
contexts, there seems to be widespread tacit acknowledgement that what is produced
working alone in a test can be considered to offer a pragmatic assessment of what
someone can remember with limited support—and so reflects what is “known”.
Memory
However, memory is an area where folk-psychology notions may seem seductive
(Claxton, 2005). Memory, on such an account, is a kind of storage space where
we place things we may want to take out again later. When we remember, we take
those same things back out of memory, and metaphorically blow off the dust as we
re-examine them.
Here cognitive science has much to offer. For one thing, studies of memory have
sharpened the distinction between working memory (where currently considered
material is processed) and long-term memory. The rather severe limits of work-
ing memory have been used to explain some student learning difficulties in terms
of tasks being beyond the capacity of working memory, although it has also been
argued that this severe limitation is an adaptation to prevent our thinking becoming
too labile for our own good (Sweller, 2007).
However, more significantly, cognitive science shows that long-term memory is
based upon making structural changes in a substrate that can later channel thinking.
The important point here is that the memory traces are different in nature to the
ideas. This should perhaps be obvious to all, but the influence of the metaphors of
everyday life should not be underestimated (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). We do not
put ideas into storage,
we code them in a very different format
.
