Learning by memorization has fallen out of favour in Canadian schools, but a new study indicates it plays an important role in the developing brains of math students. The study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience scanned the brains of 68 children between the ages of seven and nine as they solved single-digit addition problems.
Listen“This (study) confirms the research findings of cognitive psychologists and other researchers over many years that you need a certain amount of things in your brain memory in order to have room for higher order thinking,” says Michael Zwaagstra, research fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and a high school teacher in the province of Manitoba. “So the more you know the more that you’re able to learn.”Rote learning ‘strongly discouraged’
Rote learning is “strongly discouraged” in programs that train teachers in Canada. For example, it is no longer a standard practice to have children memorize multiplication tables. Instead, the programs “adhere to an ideology known as constructivism,” says Zwaagstra, “this idea that students need to focus on self-discovery and learning, for example, math algorithms on their own. This is an ideology that is very dominant and largely responsible for the decline in any form of rote learning or memorization.”
Education is handled by the provinces in Canada, so the practices vary in each jurisdiction. The teachers have more or less discretion in how they teach, and some do incorporate some rote learning. Zwaagstra hopes this study will get people to re-think the use of rote-learning and its value in the classroom.
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