What is 'rote learning'? (Teaching Facts)
Rote learning is an unhelpful term. Instead we should talk about rote knowledge
Podcast is AI generated, and will make mistakes. Interactive transcript available in the podcast post.
Previously, we started to look into teaching facts. To teach facts: ‘just tell them.’
But we often don’t feel comfortable ‘just telling them.’
Part of the explanation for why we don’t feel comfortable is that we fear we’re just promoting a form of ‘rote learning,’ asking kids to just parrot back, or regurgitate what we told them.
The error is in the use of the term rote learning.
We should instead talk about rote knowledge.
Rote knowledge is generally not well understood.
The typical chain of reasoning is this:
Drills, memorisation exercises, and repetitious exercises are all forms of rote learning
Rote learning leads to rote knowledge
Rote knowledge is knowledge without understanding
Rote knowledge is therefore bad
Rote learning is therefore bad
Drills, memorisation exercises, and repetitious exercises are therefore bad
This chain of reasoning has historically led academics to push teachers into abandoning anything that looks like drill or memorisation exercises in favour of what they call ‘conceptual understanding.’
‘Conceptual understanding,’ the theory goes, will produce the same procedural fluency and accuracy of these more traditional exercises, however, learners will also be gifted with conceptual understanding at the same time: they will be able to articulate why the processes work (think mathematical oracy and literacy,) and be more able to adapt when the tasks change beyond the very standard tasks set in classic textbooks and standardised exams. On top of all that, because their learning is meaningful, not rote, they will remember everything.
In sum, ‘conceptual understanding’ was once touted as panacea to all teachers’ woes.
The outcomes are desirable, and the ambition is laudable. Sadly it hasn’t panned out.
In the words of one maths teacher on our Transformation Programme, reflecting on the Scotland’s focus on conceptual understanding in mathematics:
Ten years ago all the kids could add fractions but it’s true they didn’t understand anything of what they were doing.
Today, they still don’t understand anything about fractions, but now they can’t add them either!
This pursuit of ‘conceptual understanding’ has had such a deleterious effect that many teachers in England are now instead pushing for SLOP: Shed Loads of Practice, and reversing the disparaging dysphemism ‘drill and kill’ to become ‘drill and thrill.’
Executing a mathematical procedure fluently and accurately is not rote, even if you don’t understand why the procedure works.
This is very easy to make sense of; just conjure to mind any mathematical process you yourself can effortlessly execute, but can’t articulate why it works. Depending on your level of mathematical knowledge you might choose:
‘doing the same thing to both sides of an equation’ - you might understand that that’s what you have to do, but not be able to explain why, and why it always ‘works’ to do this
flip and multiply to divide fractions - most of us divide fractions this way, but few of us can explain why it works. Fewer still realise that you don’t have to flip and multiply - you can directly divide 1/2 by 1/4 to get 2, and there are times that that is a more appropriate method of division, along with a reason that 99% of the time we flip and multiply instead. Do you know those reasons?
using the formula for the volume of a sphere - you might understand what it does and how to use it, but not be able to explain why it’s 4/3 Pi r^3 -
using the quadratic formula - you might know that it gives the roots of a quadratic, and how to use it, but you might not be able to explain why it works. You might understand what it does and how to use it, but not be able to explain why it’s this:
discriminant - likewise, you might know that the discriminant gives the number of real roots of a quadratic, but not be able to say why
complex roots - you might be able to show how to write the non-real roots of a quadratic in complex form, but not be able to represent that visually like you can with real roots
There is always some limit to our knowledge. We recently posted on finding the Nth term rule of linear and quadratic sequences:
Until yesterday I didn’t know why we halve the second order difference as a part of the process.
Still, the fluency and accuracy with which I could execute the process is obviously not a bad thing, and it wasn’t meaningless.
In other words, it is self-evidently not ‘rote.’ There is just always more to learn.
So why did an aspiration to this kind of fluency, this kind of mastery, become disparaged?
The category error is caused by the very unhelpful term: rote learning
There is essentially no such thing as ‘rote learning.’
Connections between the word ‘rote’ and the historical use of drills, repetition and memorisation exercises was a tremendous misstep in education’s history. Those activities, perhaps once the only tool in the educator’s toolkit, should have been viewed as part of an incomplete kit, rather than something inherently negative. Something to be added to, and used judiciously, not something to be removed.
We just didn’t know then what we know now.
Instead of ‘rote learning,’ it is much better to think only in terms of rote knowledge, which is a very real and very easy to understand idea. Thinking in terms of rote knowledge also then gives us access to the idea of inflexible knowledge, and the idea of moving along a continuum, away from less flexible and towards flexible knowledge. Thinking in terms of flexible knowledge makes much more sense of the virtue of fluency and accuracy with processes you can’t explain: much learnt, with much more yet to learn.
We’ve explained what is meant by the misleading term ‘rote learning.’
Next week we’ll look more closely at the very helpful term rote knowledge.