If your GP told you that she suspected you might have a heart problem, whom would you consult next: a cardiologist or neurologist?
It’s not a trick question – it’s obviously the cardiologist. Why? Because the discipline of neurology attracts less intelligent doctors? Because neurologists have less access to research about the heart?
Clearly not. It’s because the cardiologist has in her memory a vast accumulation of knowledge about hearts, acquired through hard study and long experience. With this knowledge always at her fingertips, small patterns or anomalies will have significance to her that a neurologist might miss.
It’s all very well to say that the neurologist is equally clever and can look up the research once she knows what she’s looking for. First, she has to know what she’s looking at. She is not an expert on the heart. She brings less knowledge about the heart to her medical assessment. She is less likely to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant information, and less able to identify features of significance.
This scenario makes sense to us intuitively but has also been established empirically. Neurologists, in fact, don’t diagnose cardiac cases well.1 This is why medical specialists must complete six years of university study and then pass exams which test their understanding and recall of further monstrous quantities of specific content. This accumulation of knowledge is what equips the cardiologists or neurologists within their own fields to deal with a complex, open-ended question: what’s wrong with this patient?
Broad and deep knowledge is the basis of critical thinking. Those who already know a lot about the subject have easier access to concepts or ways of thinking that might prove useful in solving the current problem. They can also direct all their thinking capacity (which experts call ‘working memory’) to more complex aspects of the problem because they’re not struggling to remember the basics. (For instance, compare the difficulty of translating – even with a dictionary – a French sentence that contains ten words you don’t know with a sentence that contains only words you already know.) Those who know a lot are also more capable of applying relevant strategies of thought or argument: they will recognise hidden inferences or false assumptions more easily.
Both parents and teachers, therefore, should be very interested in assisting our girls to acquire knowledge – through both study and experience.
As part of our Wellbeing Programs, the girls learn and revisit a range of study skills. But even when they know what they should do, putting it into action at home can be difficult. As we come towards the end of the first semester, there will be an opportunity for all girls to reflect on their report and what the next steps for improvement might be. As the Director of Curriculum explained, the Senior School girls will engage in a goal-setting exercise at the end of term which they will bring home on the last day. As you review the goals set with your daughter, you might be looking for specific ways you can support her.
Given that critical thinking in any area rests on a secure foundation of knowledge, you might wish to offer her assistance in widening and deepening her knowledge base. This means, bluntly, remembering lots of things. How can you help?
There are two aspects to this: getting the content knowledge into memory in the first place, and then keeping it there.
On the first point, you could talk to your daughter about planning her study to allow for spaced practice. In addition to the Wellbeing Program, Mr Townley has spoken to the girls in assembly on this several times so the girls should be well-versed (if they remember the assemblies!). The research on spaced practice is emphatic: if you practise at intervals, you can achieve the same result in half the time. For instance, reviewing something three times for ten minutes a few days apart can be just as effective as spending more than an hour on the same material in one session. An excellent explanation and resources to guide implementation can be found here. Planning well ahead could really help your daughter reduce her study load while improving her results, and many girls would benefit from some parental assistance in implementing this next semester.
Once the knowledge has been acquired it can fade. To retain it, simply re-reading or highlighting notes is ineffective. Instead, we need to keep accessing the knowledge actively, which is called retrieval practice. One scientifically proven way to do this is (as old-fashioned as it sounds) to use flashcards. These can be used for everything from times tables to the causes of the Russian Revolution to impressionist painting techniques. Of course, you have to understand the material first and flashcards are not the right tool for that! But then you have to retain the essentials over the long term. If you’re struggling to understand how such a basic technique can be useful for more complex ideas, there is some good practical advice about designing flashcards here and here.
Then, to get the best out of both techniques, you can combine flashcards on different topics with spaced practice. For instance, if she can readily recall this week the essential plot devices used in Shakespearian comedies, the properties of metals and twenty irregular French verbs, she could mix up the sets of flashcards and test herself on a quarter of each set over the coming four weeks, to keep the content at her fingertips and allow it to bed down into her long-term memory. Then next term, she may only need to revisit this content once more to be on top of it all – and then perhaps once every six months. There are good quality apps that do all the work for you on this, such as Anki and Quizlet, and I would recommend that any parent who is keen to assist their daughter’s study habits investigate these options.
The completion of this report cycle is an ideal time for the girls to set their own goals for improvement. If your daughter is looking to make her study more effective, this may be one way in which you can help her.
Further Reading:
Occasional Paper Series: How to Teach Critical Thinking (danielwillingham.com) – an excellent overview, suitable for the lay reader, of the research base informing how to teach critical thinking.
1 Rikers, R. M. J. P., Schmidt, H. G., & Boshuizen, H. P. A. (2002). On the constraints of encapsulated knowledge: Clinical case representations by medical experts and subexperts. Cognition and Instruction, 20(1), 27–45.