Knowledge, Memory and Assessment: Why it is time to review the Northern Ireland Revised Curriculum

Nobody can deny the worthiness of the aims of the Northern Ireland Revised Curriculum.  It 'aims to empower young people to develop their potential and to make informed and responsible choices and decisions throughout their lives as individuals, as contributors to society and as contributors to the local and global economy and environment', Noble aims, indeed. At secondary school one of our objectives is to prepare young people so that they can hopefully pass and succeed in examinations - thus opening doors and pathways for future study and careers, This is, of course, vitally important.  However, the aim of any curriculum progression model should be broader than pure exam success. The aims of our curriculum in Northern Ireland probably encapsulate well what those broader aims of education should be.

Yet something is not right with our Revised Curriculum. For a long time now - as a teacher and now as a Principal - I have felt uneasiness at how statutory regulations are meant to be reflected in the classroom. Perhaps my uneasiness is prompted by my misgivings about the perennially low performance of boys in the non-selective sector in subjects such as Maths, how certain pedagogy which the Revised Curriculum seems to espouse is translated within the classroom, such as group work and increased use of ICT, and how the Revised Curriculum seems to shun explicit and overt direction by the teacher in favour of teacher 'facilitation'. I have thought long and hard about this uneasiness, and have distilled and categorised it into three key concerns: Knowledge, Memory and Assessment.

I intend to outline each concern in detail and in separate blog posts, starting with Knowledge. My conclusion in each blog post will be the same: it is time to review the Revised Curriculum in light of what cognitive science is indicating in all 3 areas.

The tension between Knowledge and Skills -Why the Northern Ireland Curriculum has got the balance wrong:

The Northern Ireland Revised Curriculum encourages a focus on developing ‘generic’ skills. The statutory requirements for each ‘Area of Learning’ at Key Stage 3 identify the development of such supposed skills as key learning outcomes, such as researching and managing information, thinking critically and flexibly, solving problems, demonstrating creativity, working effectively with others, managing information, self-management and communicating effectively. The standardisation of learning outcomes in each ‘Area of Learning’ in such a way highlights the implication pervading the Revised Curriculum that such skills are transferable, discrete and teachable. The prominence of such generic skills in Revised Curriculum Learning Outcomes suggests that they are most important, and that the content – the knowledge – which helps to develop them can be interchangeable. The Revised Curriculum reduced the amount of content on the curriculum and placed emphasis on the skills pupils should develop. The fact that subjects are grouped into ‘Areas of Learning’ (eg History and Geography is known as ‘Environment and Society’) is an attempt to encourage teachers to think of lessons more as a series of ‘learning experiences’, where pupils may negotiate the meanings of the knowledge that they have brought to the classroom. Teachers are encouraged to have skills-based learning intentions in every lesson. Some of the implications of the Revised Curriculum have perhaps been:

o   less emphasis on the transmission of new knowledge by the teacher;

o   more emphasis on project-based learning, both within subjects and between subjects;

o   enhanced use of group work;

o   greater focus on ‘discovery-learning’ as opposed to explicit and direct didactic teaching. The teacher, hence, is ‘guide on the side’ as opposed to ‘sage on the stage’;

o   pupils create their own ‘knowledge’ through research or other means;

o   emphasis on making lesson content ‘relevant’ to pupils’ experiences. 

However,  cognitive science indicates that skills are neither generic nor transferable. In fact, they are very specific to the domain, and heavily dependent upon strong factual knowledge. Adriaan de Groot’s chess experiment displays this perfectly. When asked to replicate a series of strategic chess positions involving 15-20 pieces on a chess board having just seen the board for 10-20 seconds, experts overwhelmingly outclassed novices and amateurs. However, when the pieces were randomised and were not based on strategic position, experts performed similarly to novices. The conclusion? Experts performed better on the former test because they had specific, deep strategic knowledge of chess positions in long-term memory. They were able to 'chunk' this knowledge in order to replicate the strategic position on the chess board. In the randomised tests, they could not rely on that knowledge and the skill of analytical recall was not transferable. Indeed, whilst a chess master has strong analytical skills in the domain of chess, put him in a lab and he will not be able to find a cure for a disease. He will need a lot of understanding of other domains such as Biology before he can apply those skills.

Furthermore, discovery learning activities which our Revised Curriculum seems to prefer which sometimes encourage pupils to ‘think like a scientist’ or think like a historian’ may fail as pupils lack the domain-specific knowledge, deliberate practice and experience necessary in the journey from novice to expert. Experts create knowledge. Pupils cannot journey to that stage without a deep understanding of existing subject knowledge (Daniel Willingham ‘Critical Thinking’ p 16). The way in which the brain stores new information, and makes inferences and discoveries, is by connecting to existing stored knowledge. You cannot have skills without knowledge, because you cannot evaluate something you do not know anything about. You also cannot come up with new ideas without jumping off existing ones: Einstein could not have discovered relativity if Newton had not already come up with gravity - and if someone had not taught Einstein about Newton’s discovery. And Newton could not have come up with gravity without the inventions of many who came before him: that is why he said he was “standing on the shoulders of giants”. Newton and Einstein were among the most creative people in history: creativity requires knowledge.

Why the Curriculum should be Knowledge-Based

The Revised Curriculum emphasises skills. However, the notion that we should promote so-called 21st Century skills over knowledge because we are trying to prepare pupils for life and work in a rapidly changing world, for jobs that perhaps don't exist yet, is now (and perhaps always was) fundamentally flawed. Indeed, the notion that 'thinking creatively', working with others' and 'problem-solving' are somehow 'new' skills for the 21st Century which didn't exist before is somewhat bemusing. Did Marcus Aurelius not think creatively in his musings about philosophy 2000 years ago? Did Seneca not converse with other philosophers and stoics when deliberating upon his writings? 

Surely the purpose of our education system is to teach children domain-specific background knowledge and understanding which - through deliberate practice and the accrual of experience - can allow them to make the journey to expert as they acquire domain-specific skills. For a scientist, this will involve the advanced skill of scientific method - generating hypotheses, interpreting anomalies, deep analytical thinking, comparing and contrasting, etc. But let's not deceive ourselves that this skill will be transferable. It will be the skill of an expert - but an expert within a particular domain.

So factual knowledge must precede skill because:

1: A stronger knowledge base is needed for new GCSE and ‘A’ Level examinations, which include increased theory testing and less testing of supposed ‘generic, transferable skills’;

2: Cognitive science, as we have seen, indicates that background knowledge pre-empts strong domain-specific skills (Daniel Willingham ‘Why don’t students like school? P25);

3: The transmission of high-quality knowledge is one of the most effective and expedient ways of closing the ‘learning gap’ between children who come from different cultural backgrounds;

4: Knowledge comprehension lays the foundation for the journey from surface learning to deep learning, from novice to expert.

A number of studies have shown that disadvantaged students benefit most from a knowledge-based curriculum, because they have not been exposed to the range of vocabularies and high-level cultural knowledge outside school as some of their more fortunate peers. If you grow up in an ‘academic’ family, with a house full of books that your parents discuss with you, if you are taken on trips to museums, etc, you will absorb a lot of facts. If you do not and are not intrinsically motivated to learn, you will not have the same opportunity. That is why school needs to impart knowledge systematically. Teaching knowledge explicitly and effectively is our best chance of ensuring equality for all our pupils;

A number of studies have also shown that “explicit instruction” (NB Greg Ashman) is particularly effective. In explicit instruction, the teacher deliberately teaches the students, rather than leaving it up to them to discover the answer. Pupils only progress to the next concept when they have mastered the previous one, and they use deliberate practice (NB Daisy Christodoulou) a lot to make sure they understand what they have been taught (think of how people learn to play musical instruments well). This 'explicit instruction' does not mean that pupils are passive in the learning process; this is an ‘active’ process for pupils as there is a constant dialogue between teacher and pupils in the form of questions and answers, as well as regular formative assessment and testing, so that the teacher knows if the knowledge is being understood and can respond accordingly. And for those who fear it removes opportunities to harness pupil 'engagement', I think the opposite. Because true engagement on the part of pupils will come when they see their knowledge developing cumulatively, and when they see themselves building on prior knowledge on that journey from novice to expert, from beginner to mastery. 

I believe that a knowledge-based curriculum offers pupils the best opportunities for success, not just within assessment and examination contexts, but also in relation to broader curricular aims. The predominant aim must be the explicit teaching of domain-specific knowledge. As a result, the curriculum design should have strong, formal foundations in traditional subjects, each with a clear progression model which is structured carefully so that pupils are building on what they already know.  This progression model must be aligned with a pedagogical focus on how knowledge can be embedded into long-term memory.