How Many Marks for Asparagus? Why Understanding Beats Memorisation
By Julian Dance —
Tags: Understanding vs Recall, Long-term Memory, Misconceptions, Schema Building, Deeper Understanding, Learning & Memory
A student labelled the oesophagus as "asparagus" and the bronchioles as "broccoli". Funny? Absolutely. But the story reveals something important about the difference between recall and genuine understanding.
By Julian Dance, Co-Founder of SideCog, Head of Science and Head of Big Ideas How Many Marks for Asparagus? I was standing in a school corridor recently, probably on toilet duty, holding a pile of handouts showing a diagram of the human lungs. I was on my way to teach a lesson where students would be expected to label the diagram. A fairly standard science task. Name the parts. Get the spellings right. Collect the marks. As I waited, a curious student wandered over. "What's that?" I showed him the sheet. "It's a diagram of the lungs. The class will be labelling it in a minute." The student loo