How Structure Increases Learning

Structure is the key to how people learn and has such far-reaching implications for teaching that it deserves an entire section of its own. In fact, without it, there is no knowledge.

Students are always talking about “information” when they refer to what they are learning. After all, this is the “information age,” and abundant information is constantly available. It’s a snap to find people’s phone numbers, the capitals of countries, the years of events, directions from one place to another, an area’s major industries, economic figures, political leaders, and election results, to name just a few common pieces of information. But all of these are only facts: isolated bits of information that do not add up to any generalizations or conclusions about the way the world works.

What isn’t so available is knowledge, that is, organized bodies of knowledge, which is what we academics have to offer that information-packed websites do not. Knowledge is a structured set of patterns that we have identified through observation, followed by reflection and abstraction, a grid that we have carefully superimposed on a messy world so we can make predictions and applications. Knowledge comprises useful concepts, agreed-on generalizations, well-grounded inferences, strongly backed theories, reasonable hypotheses, and well-tested principles and probabilities. Without knowledge, science and advanced technology wouldn’t exist.

Unfortunately, students who join any course, usually leave them, viewing the material as a bunch of absolute, disconnected facts, supplemented by technical terms, about as well organized, meaningful, and memorable as a phone book. These facts and “things” were out there. Human beings “discovered” them; we didn’t construct them. From this perspective, memorization is the only learning strategy that makes sense. Students are not stupid; they are simply novices in our discipline. They lack a solid base of prior knowledge and may harbor misconceptions and faulty models about the subject matter. Being unable to identify the central, core concepts and principles, they wander somewhat aimlessly through a body of knowledge, picking up and memorizing what may or may not be important facts and terms and using trial-and-error to solve problems and answer questions. They do not see the big picture of the patterns, generalizations, and abstractions that experts recognize so clearly. As a result, they have trouble figuring out how to classify and approach problems at the conceptual level.

Without that big picture, students face another learning hurdle as well. The mind processes, stores, and retrieves knowledge not as a collection of facts but as a logically organized whole, a coherent conceptual framework, with interconnected parts. In fact, it requires a big picture. That framework is what prior knowledge is all about. New material is integrated not into an aggregate of facts and terms but into a preexisting structure of learned knowledge. Without having a structure of the material in their heads, students fail to comprehend and retain new material.

By: Francis David