Harvard Prof: We Must Get Better at Teaching Higher-Level Knowledge Processing Skills
January 15 2009 / by Alvis Brigis / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Education Year: General Rating: 2
Harvard education professor Daniel Koretz says we're not doing a good job teaching our children how to solve complex problems, thus failing to raise a generation possessing the new mandatory level of cognitive ability.
Koretz argues that we're teaching too much memorization and not enough "complex application of knowledge" and that "we need to back off the lower level skills to make room for the higher ones".
From cognitive hostorian James Flynn's perspective, such a shift would equate with ascending the stairs of abstraction, or boosting our mental software while outsourcing non-essential abilities such as memory to "prosthetics" like Google (as Stephen Gordon at The Speculist likes to put it).
Unfortunately, Koretz points out that higher order skills are 1) difficult to teach due to the salaries available to instructors, and 2) difficult to test because there is no way to ensure that subjects haven't recently been exposed to situations related to the problem being tested.
Fortunately, it appears that social media and the web are riding to the rescue.
I find it very likely that the "accountability system" that Koretz is waiting for will be based on emerging social media models that permit students to assemble longitudinal graphs of their capabilities, behaviors, connections, exposure to information, etc.
Furthermore, I think it's also very likely that the increasingly complex web economy and environment will generate the new abstraction technologies necessary to teach more complex skills in a short amount of time.
Doubt these guesses? If so, find your local 13-year-old who plays online video games regularly and watch as they zoom through their PS3 of XBox 360 games chatting with teammates, finding every little crack in the rules and mastering some pretty amazing skills. Then imagine a web that can easily support such accountability and teching structures, even bringing them "under the hood" of our normal browsing and web usage.
The tools are emerging. We just need to get very creative in their application.
