Dr. John Sweller: Why Johnny Can't Read

In this episode, Therese Markow and Dr. John Sweller discuss the decline in student preparedness for college and how the modern education system, which has shifted from knowledge acquisition to inquiry-based learning, is at the root of that decline. Dr. Sweller explains his Cognitive Load Theory, breaks down the differences between working memory and long-term memory, and why ineffective teaching methods continue to survive. Finally, they talk about the changemakers in education and how political and bureaucratic intervention can drive educational reform.

 Key Takeaways:

• Education changed about 1-2 decades ago. The emphasis switched from the acquisition of knowledge to how to acquire knowledge itself. We need to emphasize the acquisition, not the discovery, of knowledge in education. 

• Students who are subjected to inquiry-based educational approaches do substantially worse on international tests than students who are exposed to a knowledge-rich curriculum. The more emphasis your education system places on inquiry learning, the worse the students do.

• If you don’t show students how to do something and they don’t figure it out themselves, it cannot go into long-term memory. 

• The best way to obtain information is to obtain it from somebody else. If you want to efficiently have somebody learn something, the best way to do it is to have somebody explicitly explain it. 

"An educated person who can do things, think about things, solve problems, which otherwise they couldn't dream about solving, is somebody who's got enormous amounts of information in long-term memory, and that immediately tells us what education should be about. You need to have lots of information in long term memory, and an educated person is different from an uneducated person because of that and solely because of that." —  Dr. John Sweller

Episode References: 

• Greg Ashman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-ashman-phd-790b59ab/ 

Connect with Dr. John Sweller:

Professional Bio: https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/john-sweller 

Connect with Therese:

Website: www.criticallyspeaking.net

Threads: @critically_speaking

Email: theresemarkow@criticallyspeaking.net

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