By Siamack Zahedi
There is a severe learning crisis in India and globally. While nearly all children start school, far too many do not learn even the most foundational cognitive and socio-emotional capabilities that are needed to be effective lifelong learners and lead successful lives. International think tanks and governments, as well as our own National Education Policy (NEP) of India, have acknowledged this fact and flagged it as a top reform priority. So, what capabilities are we talking about exactly? Traditionally, the focus was limited to academic skills like basic literacy and numeracy skills. However, policies like the NEP 2020 today acknowledge the key role that “also social, ethical, and emotional capacities and dispositions” play in an individual’s development. And what does “foundational” mean? Definitely not rote-memorization or acing of examinations that test merely for recall! Instead, it implies the building of deep schemas of knowledge and fluency in critical skills that students can then apply adaptively in novel situations to solve problems or create something. As we can see, the emphasis on developing foundational knowledge and skills is not a lowering of expectations, but rather raising them! This is important to keep in mind today, since there are many opinions and classroom practices about so-called “progressive education” that are not supported by scientific evidence.
One such popular but naive assumption is that since we can just Google for anything, schools should stop wasting time trying to build foundational knowledge in students. However, information is not the same thing as knowledge. Information is a set of disconnected facts. Knowledge is a well-organized schema or understanding of how things work. And decades of research has shown that the biggest individual differences in student performance at school is the quality and quantity of what they know. The more you know about a particular topic or domain, and the more automatic your ability to apply procedures related to it, the more complex the tasks you can handle and the more easily you can learn new information related to the task. Learners with large repositories of knowledge are able to identify and extract important information from the environment more effectively, thereby building their repositories even more effectively. In order to think creatively or critically, we must have prior knowledge to manipulate and work with in the first place. Also, the more automatically we can perform simple tasks because we have established fluency in critical skills, the less bandwidth from our limited working memory is expended and instead can be channeled towards higher order thinking tasks.
Evidently, all the competencies that we prize in the 21st century and earlier are all built on the foundation of essential knowledge and skills. And all children must acquire these foundations in the early years of school because it is difficult to catch up later as the curriculum moves on to more advanced material and a widening gap opens between instruction and children’s actual learning levels. Since effective learning necessarily progresses through a phased mastery process, it must be matched with pedagogy to support it. At the first stage of being a novice learner, students must engage in building a repository of basic facts, strategies, and beliefs that they are able to draw on for the purpose of carrying out routine procedures and simple tasks. At this stage, students can only develop fragmented knowledge of the domain and surface-level strategies. Deliberate practice and explicit instruction are critical pedagogical strategies to leverage at this point. Deliberate practice involves setting specific and measurable goals, receiving feedback from oneself or others on the learning task, and extending and challenging oneself to beyond their comfort zone. It is precisely this kind of practice that builds fluency in foundational knowledge and skills, prevents forgetting, promotes their transfer, and supports student performance. Explicit or direct instruction is when teachers clearly explain the purpose behind learning, its value and the success criteria. Teachers also model how students can do what is expected of them and check for students’ understanding, clarify misconceptions and give meaningful/effective feedback.
Domain-specific knowledge, like what we spend most of our time in educational institutions trying to build, is not acquired easily, unconsciously and automatically. While learners play an active role in constructing their own knowledge, this process is more efficient and effective when the learner is provided with adequate information at the outset rather than intentionally not providing all the accessible information and expecting students to uncover it though discovery or exploration – a process which exerts great demands on the learner’s working memory or causes cognitive overload, which in turn negatively affects the learning process and outcomes. Time and again, empirical studies have shown that the learning process is more efficient and successful when students receive explicit instruction first, and then the level of guidance gradually reduces as they show increasing proficiency and success. Over time, the enhanced repository of knowledge along with their growing familiarity with problems typical of the domain allow students to start performing more complex tasks and solving more difficult problems effectively. This is an appropriate time to introduce “real-world”, context-relevant, and authentic learning engagements such as project-based learning, problem-based learning, or service-learning, among others. But, students must not be left to themselves without any guidance – remember, they are not experts yet. So, we must provide them with guidance on such projects, even if only by giving them “just in time” instruction in small pieces right before the dive into exploratory tasks.
The author is co-CEO, director, Education and Research, The Acres Foundation. Views are personal.