TOPIC: ISSUE28 - "Students should memorize facts only after they have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts. Students who have learned only facts have learned very little."
WORDS: 426 TIME: 02:34:29 DATE: 2008/6/27 19:07:49
Nowadays we are living in a special society, which is a Sargasso Sea of knowledge one. Living in such a society, newly developed information come from nearly every aspect, thus students cannot acquire the facts and its ideas, trends or concepts of every subject. They need to separate which facts should be dug in with those concepts, trends and ideas and which need not.
Acquiring facts related ideas, trends and concepts, which is the information to explain the facts, before students memorize facts, is an excellent method of study. According to a psychologist’s experiment, the human's brain is a memory that can easily learn those events which is related to the events that the brain has acquired before. That is to say, we can memorize new knowledge effectively if we can find out some other related events in our memory and try to learn both the knowledge and the related events together.
Simply but, if we do not search the related information in our memory while learning a new knowledge, the learning progress will become harder. For example, we can memorize a arithmetic progression quickly due to a formula in our memory that can work out all the numbers that belong to the sequence, however, if we do not know about the formula, we can only memorize the numbers one by one and may never acquire the whole sequence.
On the other hand, it is not all the facts that worth us to acquire the information to explain them. Our profession and occupation determined that in some fields, it is better to memorize facts than to acquire both related information and facts. Cell phones are being widely used now, but only a few professional persons can explain what GSM network is and how the cell phone works. The users of cell phones just need to know that a cell phone can be used to dial, to connect the wireless network and they do not need to figure out how cell phone invented or other details. That means knowledge of just the facts, cell phones, is enough for the users.
Therefore, it is necessary to acquire the related information of the facts when you are in your study field or major course, as you have acquired those information it will help you to memorize the facts smoothly. On the contrary, we cannot dig out all the concepts, ideas and trends that behind the facts in this era of information, which need us to aware that, for the facts out of our field, learn only facts is enough.
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