We ask students to remember a lot. Much of this is factual information. And, much of this is forgotten after the exam. This is nothing new. What is new is the direction that technology is taking to retrieve the facts that we never retained or cannot remember.
During February’s Jeopardy special edition episodes, IBM’s Watson, a computer system designed to answer questions in natural language, won impressively over two Jeopardy record-holding participants. Watson won clue after clue, game after game, and is now being prepared for use as a diagnostic tool in medicine and other fields.
Human memory is no less remarkable. But, how we use our brains seems to change over time. In his book, Moon Walking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (2011, The Penguin Press), Joshua Foer describes the history of impressive memory feats dating back to the fifth century B.C. He writes, "Once upon a time every literate person was versed in the techniques [of memorization]...Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it." This skill served members of oral cultures for centuries.
Today, memorization of large amounts of information has turned from being a practical tool to a mere stunt as we discover new methods of storing and retrieving information. Foer's book chronicles his study of, and preparation for, the U.S. Memory Championship which is about all that remains of this memorization form. This is not to say that memorization is not being practiced. We all follow strategies for storing and retrieving information in our heads—especially students (although, use of Watson during exams would probably be forbidden).
We choose different memory strategies depending on how we expect to use the information. This result was studied in the late 1970s by Elizabeth F. Loftus (University of California, Irvine) who found students stored information differently depending on whether they expected to merely recognize the correct answer from a set of choices or were asked to recall the answer. Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published an article in Science magazine (July, 2011) titled Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. She, too, studied the effects of our expected use of information on our memory strategies. According to Sparrow, “when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it." Put simply, we only memorize what we think we have to and look up the rest. We devise memory strategies appropriate to our expected use of the information.
So, how are we using computer technology to help students improve their learning skills? What kind of memory strategies are we encouraging through practice? When we challenge students only with multiple choice questions are we encouraging a form of memorization that has decreasing utility? Since the 1960s, multiple-choice questions have been a favored computerized method of "engaging" the student through technology. But, even by 1970 MIT researcher Jaime R. Carbonell ("Mixed-Initiative Man-Computer Dialogues") pointed out the limitations of these learning methods. In response, he developed a program called SCHOLAR that was capable of conducting Socratic-style dialogues in natural language on the topic of geography. Remarkably, this was done on a primitive computer (XDS-940) with incredibly small processing and storage capabilities. Over 40 years later our "go to" e-Learning tool continues to be the multiple choice quiz.
What kind of memory will humans need as the development of computerized search expands to eventually embed Watson on a chip? How are we helping enhance the student's ability to acquire the kinds of learning skills that will prove beneficial now and in the future? Is our comfort with recognition-based assessments that cover areas of factual knowledge ignoring a paradigm shift in the kind of information we need our brains to better organize and retain?
Just as the need to memorize certain types of information faded with the written word, perhaps we should re-examine the types of information we ask students to remember and the expectations we set for them in their use of that information. Minds that are trained to recognize answers or even recall large numbers of facts may be in serious jeopardy in a world where these types of memory retrieval feats are better performed by descendants of Watson.
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