One of the most significant extensions of our knowledge over the past 30 years is our understanding of how students learn. This has increased the power of the pedagogical tools at our disposal while simultaneously revealing a far greater challenge to be met with their help than we had previously acknowledged.
Creating knowledge is often cited as a key university priority. Where is this knowledge created? The standard answer is, in laboratories and research institutes: its success crowned with peer review publications and, for a fortunate few, the Nobel Prize. That is all true. Yet it is only half or even less than half the story.
Knowledge is also created every time a student grasps an existing idea or a concept, however many others may have already reached that same point of understanding. For such knowledge is created within that one particular student for the first time, since he or she has had to assemble understanding on his or her own out of the materials made available by teachers, fellow students, or personal experience.
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When we think of learning, we may think of students’ heads as empty rooms, ready to be furnished by the faculty. But it would be far more accurate to say that it is the students who must build their own furniture, perhaps with ready-made parts, à la Ikea.
Moreover, to push this analogy a bit farther, the rooms to be furnished at university are not empty but are already full and overfull, often crammed with very shoddy furniture indeed, which has to be carted off to the tip before refurnishing can begin.
Let me illustrate what we might call the “problem of prior knowledge” with an example drawn from my own university.
In 1982, a film crew hired by the staff of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and funded by the American National Science Foundation, attended a graduation ceremony at Harvard.
At the ceremony’s conclusion they interviewed seniors, still in their academic robes, proudly holding diplomas that attested to their formal induction into the company of educated men and women, and asked them a deceptively simple question: “what causes the seasons?”
The answers are delivered with the sort of polish one would hope that a Harvard graduate could command. Yet 21 of 24, including a Harvard history professor who happened to be a parent of a graduating senior, failed to give the true reason for why it is warmer in Cambridge in July than in December.
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Watching this film is an electrifying moment for anyone who believes in the importance of general education. It challenges our assumptions about how education works in a fundamental way. Viewers cannot help but be impressed with the presentation skills of these students, while lamenting how little effect their education has had on their beliefs.
Most students explain that the Earth’s orbit around the sun is an ellipse, and so in winter the Earth is farther away from the sun than in the summer. The farther away, the less heat reaches it, and hence winters in New England are colder than summers.
These Harvard students are obviously reasoning about the solar system by means of an analogy derived from their own repeated personal experience, namely that approaching a heat source makes you warmer. That is true of a stove, heat vent, or fireplace; and it would be true of the planet we live on if, indeed, the Earth’s orbit was elliptical. But it is not.
This is an edited extract from the Menzies Oration given by Professor Wilkinson at the University of Melbourne on July 11, 2006. Read the full speech
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