The Need for Details—One More Reason for Low Level Thinking

One of the casualties of Bloom’s taxonomy emphasizing high level cognitive skills, it seems to me as a writing teacher, is that not only has memorization become passé, but noticing as well.  English teachers want details in your writing.  It’s amazing, though how hard it is to get those.  Some of it is due to the language we teachers use—“details” can have various levels of specificity (see my YouTube video on The Ladder of Abstraction).  Still, people don’t notice their environment.  We have a hard time describing what our street looks like from our front window.  We’ll miss colors and whole objects.  Even when we see the trees for the forest, we can’t identify them.  When we hear a bird, we can’t name it or suggest the shape of its call.  We have trouble describing the face of our best friend.

Such a focus on the forest means that the defense of claims is often vague or irrelevant.  Anecdotes and procedures lack continuity because the steps between the beginning and end were invisible, as though the camera’s shutter got stuck.

Some folks lay the blame on the observation that you are to blame: when better alternatives are lacking, you have your noses stuck to your smart phones.  It’s hard to notice one’s surroundings when always looking down.

True enough, but I saw the poor recall/ignorance of detail with my high school students long before smart phones became ubiquitous.  Face it, teachers have been trained to train you to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate from the time your’re in grade school.  We teachers have lost balance, though, and since we abhor “drill and kill” and mock learning “names and dates,” we have forgotten the need for lower level knowledge, even though it is the foundation for Bloom’s entire structure.

I can’t help but think that this handicaps inquiry (we read only for the “main idea”) as well as argument.  Furthermore, we enable and reinforce “biased assimilation,” our preference for evidence confirming our stands over contradictory facts.  If we don’t bother remembering facts, such self-protective regard is even more secure. 

Add to that, of course, postmodernist doubts about the very concept of objective fact, and we leave you without a crucial intellectual tool.

Pile on Trump's insistence that everything criticizing him is "fake news."  It's not just a class issue.  White, educated, middle class parents listen to the conspiracy theorists--some of them, we now know are Russian propagandists--and refuse to vaccinate their children. The dangers multiply.

Bereiter and Scardamalia have documented that knowledge enables experts to dramatically shorten how they solve problems compared to non-experts.  Some of that is procedural and skill-based, but underneath it all is domain specific knowledge of what things are and how they work. 

The stories of students’ ignorance continue to surface, their “college readiness” questioned, and their high failure rates leading to dysfunctional political initiatives (Rich).

Intellectual skills form the mortar that puts facts into context and relates them to each other and to conceptual schemes.  But mortar without bricks makes for poor structures.

Sources

Bereiter, Carl, and Marlene Scardamalia. Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. Print.

Rich, Motoko. "As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short." New York Times 26 Dec. 2015, sec. A. NY Times. Web. 31 Dec. 2015.