model essay-issue 48

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issue 48/92

issue 48Educators should teach facts only after their students have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.

很有趣的问题

Teaching involves presenting facts and discussing the ideas, trends and concepts that may help students better understand the facts.  Whether teachers should teach facts after discussing the explanations depends on the reasons why the facts have to be taught in the particular educational contexts as well as the learning abilities of the students .  I’ll explain my position with some specific examples.

If the purpose of learning a fact is to use it as a tool to solve problems, there would be no need to talk about the ideas or concepts behind such fact.  Consider the well-known fact that any numbers that are divisible by 3 would have the sum of their digits divisible by 3 as well.   This piece of fact is very useful for primary school children to do arithmetic operations with numbers as they can very quickly decide if a number is divisible by 3 or not by adding up the digits of the numbers.  But few math teachers in elementary schools would discuss why this fact holds true simply because students do not need to know this in order to use the fact.  

Teachers should not talk about the concepts or ideas behind a fact if the students are not mature or well-prepared to understand the issues. Returning to the example in the previous paragraph, in order to understand why trick about numbers divisible by 3 works, one has to use a bit of elementary algebra that involves equation.  Obviously, primary school students would not be able to understand it even if the teachers try to teach the ideas behind the facts.  Therefore, the abilities of the students have to be taken into account when making decisions on what to teach.  

Of course, in other contexts, students do need to learn the ideas and trends behind certain facts. For example, in a political science course on contemporary Chinese society, the professors may discuss the fact that Chinese people have to apply for permits before they have babies under the one-child policy.  Without some knowledge of the historical background of the one-child policy and how the Chinese government developed and implemented the policy, it would be very tempting to conclude that such policy is an outrageous and barbaric violation of basic human rights.  Only after learning the social conditions of China in early 1980s and the concerns of the Chinese government at the time could the students develop a more balanced view on this controversial issue.  In other words, for more sophisticated and contentious social and political problems, facts should be taught after discussing the related context and trends.  

In conclusion, how facts and related issues should be taught and in what orders should be decided by the teachers based on the purpose of learning the fact, the students’ learning abilities and the nature of the problems or issues related to the facts.



issue 92) Educators should base their assessment of students' learning not on students' grasp of facts but on the ability to explain the ideas, trends, and concepts that those facts illustrate.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.



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