Chapter 4

This day’s reading really spoke to me personally. The detailed discussions of how students only study for what they know will be on the tests, and immediately forget directly after they take the exams, is something that, although I don’t like to admit, I have done for years. The author stated how she believed that more kids these days find it difficult to truly comprehend what they are learning in school, which is possibly due to the complexity of some of the concepts, the fast rate in which topics are discussed and then new ones brought up, or even because teens these days have more responsibilities. I can say for myself that the main reason why I only memorized information for exams was if I did not really understand what I was learning. I never had any of the new information devoted to my memory, so I had to use note cards to memorize definitions and concepts that I knew would be on the tests. Of course, I did not do this for every class I was in, just the ones like philosophy and psychology where I just couldn’t seem to grasp the material. My teachers were all adequate, yet they just covered the topics far too quickly and I couldn’t seem to keep up.

                The way I was able to just memorize definitions and still do well in those classes was because teachers these days only test students at the lowest level of learning. As I learned in my Ed 249 class last semester, there are 6 levels of learning- remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and lastly creating. Teachers generally test students for remembering only, and maybe a few will venture off to understanding. These upper levels of learning require that the learner truly understand the material and be able to use what they know in a variety of different ways. If students were taught to understand better, and were given tests and essays that actually tested them on these upper levels of learning, chances are students would indeed learn far more. They would be unable to merely memorize information- they would have to have the concepts become a part of their lives. This type of learning requires more out of both the students and the teacher, but I definitely think it is worth it in the long run. Teachers need to expect more out of their students, because they can deliver and exceed even what they themselves thought possible.