Memory, recall, and reciting is not explaining.
One ultimate test for a deep understanding of something is to be able to teach it effectively to others. With only a surface understanding, you can parrot factoids to the best of your ability to recall them and you cannot even detect when you have made an error. When you actually understand something, you can talk about it, present details, and defend your position with a coherent argument based on principles.
In CHEM 210 and CHEM 215, we test for understanding. As you can see on our past examinations, including the exam sets in the books, we never ask students to ONLY remember stuff. We ask them to analyze the given information, identify as much as possible about the general area(s) and what information is needed, then recall what is relevant and to apply this information to new situations, or to the analysis of new data.
Please understand that I am not being subtle here: We do not design exam questions in CHEM 210/215 for pure recall – and we mean it. If you think for a moment that any given set of molecular structures that have been answers before will appear again, so that the more of them you can memorize the better off you are, you are in the wrong class altogether. When we write questions based upon the recent literature, it is more than likely that WE never saw those specific examples before, either, and that is why we are attracted to them for the exams.
And Professor Wolfe adds, with emphasis: “We never recycle exam questions or re-use questions from the book on exams. Just the opposite: old exams inspire book questions, and the diversity of the exam sets is testimony to how well we can construct new questions. So if a student is spending time memorizing answers to old questions thinking they will show up again on some future exam, that time is 100% wasted.”
Explanations
Just because you have gained personal knowledge about something does not mean you can explain it well. There is a type of understanding known as Explanatory Knowledge that relies on your ability to think about what you know and organize it appropriately and coherently so that others can also understand what you understand.
Imagine something that you are skilled at (sports, music, gaming) and you are asked to give some novices a lesson about it, to teach them. After the first time you try to teach anything, you think about how you could have done it better, and often with new insights about your own understanding about the topic. By the tenth time you try teaching it, you are better at teaching it and you likely understand it better.
Providing answers to examinations is merely a teaching event. Someone (in this case an instructor) is asking the implicit question “Can you explain this to me?”
There is an old saying that every instructor knows by experience: I never really learned it until I had to teach it. In fact, research on explanatory knowledge includes a profound result: when you are cognitively aware of the future need to teach something, you will learn it better in the first place.
Two important ideas emerge from Explanatory Knowledge.
- Explanatory knowledge is a form of understanding like any other, and so you make errors as you are developing your understanding about how to explain something. You cannot control the fact that you will make errors, but you have complete control over making as many of them as possible before the exam rather than at the exam.If you have not practiced making explanations to other people about what you are learning, then you are inevitably waiting for the worst possible moment to practice for the first time, namely, during an exam. This aspect of developing explanatory knowledge one significant reason why (a) working with others is so valuable, (b) talking actively and listening critically with others is useful, and (c) simply studying answers is nearly useless.
- When you are actively aware that you are learning something with the future intent of explaining it, which includes taking a test, then you actually learn it better in the first place. This fact is incredibly important. Imagine someone tells you to read an article in the school paper. You can imagine doing that. Wow. That WAS interesting. Now imagine that some tells you to read an article in the school paper because in two hours you are going to be leading a discussion about it. Is how you read the article different in this case than it was a moment ago, where you thought you were reading it for yourself? Of course it is. When you have in your mind that you are going to have the future need to explain something, you approach learning it differently.
If you are always learning with the idea that you need to meet with others to compare what you know, to talk things through, to debate your position, and yes, ultimately to take an exam, then you learn better at the outset.
This latter aspect of explanatory knowledge was demonstrated experimentally by Elaine Coleman in the late 1990s (Coleman, EB “Using Explanatory Knowledge During Collaborative Problem Solving in Science” Journal of the Learning Sciences 1998, 7, 387-427.). LINK: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1466792
Bottom line: testing in CHEM 210 and 215 always involves reading information, understanding what needs to be applied, and then building the equivalent of an explanation. If you have practiced making explanations using chemistry before the exams, you will do better than if you wait for the exam to do it for the first time.
To practice making explanations, however, you need friends/peers/colleagues/classmates with whom you can work openly and engage with the honest debate of ideas. And you need to be prepared to change your mind, because no one is right all the time – ever.
No friends? If you need to, you can set up a row of stuffed animals and teach them some chemistry – every act of explanation before the exam comes is a good one. I am not kidding. The stuffed animals are not likely to be very lively at the debate part, however.
Essay 1: You have autonomy
Essay 2: The learning skills you enter with
Essay 3: Post-COVID dialed up autonomy
Essay 4: Resources and their useful use
Essay 5: Practice explanation: Control over when you make errors
Essay 6: Testing: It’s called performance for a reason
Essay 7: Transformational Learning: Resistance is Futile
Essay 8: Grading: Scales are good; curves are bad.