Factual Atomisation (Teaching Facts)
How to atomise facts and 'just tell them' without resulting in rote knowledge
Podcast is AI generated, and will make mistakes. Interactive transcript available in the podcast post.
Try reading the passage below:
The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups… Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo any particular endeavour. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many.
If you haven’t already seen this demonstration before, then right now your brain is drawing an absolute blank.
Why?
You can read it, kinda, it’s just… you can’t really picture what’s happening.
Daniel Willingham explains that this is because you are missing ‘knowledge’ that would help fill all those gaps.
True, but not helpful enough.
Let’s dig in a little more closely.
The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups… Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo any particular endeavour. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many.
Every part of the paragraph now highlighted in bold refers to a concept of which you have no knowledge or understanding.
The moment we reveal that the passage is about washing clothes, those concepts have meaning.
Procedure: the process of putting clothes into a washing machine, adding detergent, etc.
Things: clothes
Pile: pile of clothes
Lack of facilities: lack of a washing machine
Overdo: overloading the machine by volume or weight
Things: putting clothes into the machine
Something similar happens with much shorter statements of fact:
Paris is the capital of France
Two is the smallest prime number
If a learner knows each of those concepts, in bold, then we can simply state the fact it will be understood; we can ‘just tell them.’
Just like the above examples, you take the factual statement, underline each concept in the statement, and then determine whether it is categorical or transformation.
If you are 100% confident that 100% of your students know the meaning of ‘two,’ of ‘prime number,’ and of ‘smallest,’ well now you can just tell them: “Two is the smallest prime number.”
If not, teach it to them using the atomic sequences for categorical and transformation concepts:
This process of underlining the concepts in a factual statement is what I refer to as factual atomisation.
(Note: underlining works better than bold, in practice, because you can underline more than one word and show they’re part of the same concepts, like partial fraction —> am I referring to two concepts there, partial, and fraction, or one concept, partial-fraction? But Substack doesn’t let you underline words.)
Whatever you underline will always turn out to be a categorical or a transformation.
Or, occasionally it might be a cognitive routine, for example:
To add the fractions, first find the lowest common multiple of the denominators
Add: Transformation
Fraction: Categorical
Find… : Cognitive Routine
Lowest Common Multiple: Categorical
Denominator: Categorical
‘Find’ as an English word might be understood, but in this context it means ‘find the lowest common multiple,’ and that doing that is a cognitive routine.
So now, we can modify this diagram:
Taken from here:
To make it a little clearer what we really mean by ‘check’:
Everything is atomised into concepts
How to communicate those concepts is the same each time
The concepts can then be built into sequential chains, to form cognitive routines
Or connected, related to one another, as a part of a factual statement
Next time we’ll look at the distinction between explicit and implicit memory, and how this distinction means you often can’t ‘just tell them.’
For the rest of this article I’ll share how we’ve sometimes used the technique of factual atomisation to plan a lesson, a sequence of lessons, or even a unit; beginning to hint at what we call conceptual atomisation
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