What do you work on?

- Michael

BTW, I do rails…or try. Which I think is how I found this.

What you say is true. Many students develop the procedural knowledge of navigating multiple texts, comprehending and retaining ideas, mastering new skills, and commanding information for higher purposes. However, many students do not develop those procedures out of the content-based learning model.

You are correct, content knowledge is not dead, but as a blogger that gets happy when there’s more than fifty visitors to my blog in a day, it’s no harm to be a little sensational.

thanks for your comment. look forward to connecting with you in the future.

- Michael

What you describe are the basest levels of learning. But learning can be higher. The most interesting things I learn are often the things I figure out myself, walking in a park or driving down the Interstate, or mowing the lawn.

Some of these things are deductive – if a=>b and b=>C, and a is true….etc.

But many are inductive.

Either way, I get to these conclusions by knowing and then piecing together a lot of different facts.

My favorite part of your post: “Of course, in order to learn the process of learning and information processing, you must have content with which to practice and develop the Procedural Knowledge.” True, and if teachers feel that their content is the content on which they are practicing a much more important lesson, you’d probably get better learning outcomes.

I hadn’t heard the term Procedural Knowledge applied to the learning process of cataloging information. I’ve been a long-time advocate of teaching not only the ability to process knowledge, but also the simple fact that this is what we do. I think kids should be more aware of the fact that learning is a psychological phenomenon about which we know some things (though there are certainly still huge gaps in our understanding). It’s tremendously helpful for to recognize that when I’m learning something new, I’m first just taking a bunch of information and shoving in a mental “junk drawer” where it’s largely unorganized. Then, as I become more familiar with the subject, I’m able to start sorting through those bits of information and organizing them according to meaning, importance, and relationships to other pieces of information. Eventually, I have a something like a mind map where all the data fits somewhere in a bigger picture, and I have several brain paths back to any piece of information, helping me with retrieval at a later time. But when it’s all new and very confusing, it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling like it will never make any sense, where many learners (adults in some of my training classes included) give up. Knowing the process, or even just that there IS a process, makes the application of that process to any given learning subject so much easier.

Of course, in order to learn the process of learning and information processing, you must have content with which to practice and develop the Procedural Knowledge. And it’s a fairly decent idea to have some standards for that stuff. But simply evaluating whether content knowledge can be regurgitated tells us nothing about whether students have developed the facilities for true learning.

It’s too bad all the stakeholders in this educational accountability movement can’t see that we’re really just testing memorization, and hoping that Procedural Knowledge comes about, as you say, as a by-product. Sure testing for Procedural Knowledge would be more difficult, but now that we’ve got testing going on at many levels and we’ve been many years and effort into standardized assessments, I think it’s about time thought about improving what it is we’re testing and how we’re doing it.

Heck, we ask our schools/students to demonstrate adequate yearly progress, why not our regulatory educational institutions as well?