Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

reviewed at the right time, namely just at the point where you were about to forget it. He realized that if he could identify that and turn it into an algorithm, he could design a computer programme that would help people vastly improve their memories when it came to learning a foreign language.
    So, to improve your memory, go back over what has been learned in a set and spaced fashion. Not rocket science, is it? But, as Dempster points out the spacing effect is ‘one of the most dependable and replicable phenomena in experimental psychology’, is shown to be twice as effective as what he calls ‘massed presentations’ or cramming and ‘truly ubiquitous in scope’, that is to say wherever it is observed, it works. Yet:
    With all of these characteristics in its favor, the spacing effect would seem to have considerable potential for improving classroom learning. However, there is little evidence that this potential has been realized.
    (Dempster 1988)
    Another example of the way laboratory facts fly in the face of, and are subsequently ignored by, educational practitioners, uncovered by the
Wired
article relates to the research of Robert and Elizabeth Bjork from UCLA in the US. They identified that the harder things are to learn, the better your chances are of remembering them. In other words, by making learning ‘easy’ as, for example, many language-learning courses promise to do, they actually make it far more difficult to remember the material than it could otherwise have been. As the
Wired
correspondent goes on to state:
    Precisely those things that seem to signal we’re learning well – easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjectivefeeling that we know something – are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future.
    In the twenty-first century, are we – are you – using what is scientifically known about the nature not simply of memory but of learning as a whole to ensure that every one of the children in your care is working as well as they possibly can be? Dempster is not so sure, concluding as he does that, ‘nor is there much evidence that the next generation of educators is being better informed’.
    But now you’ve read this chapter you have no excuse. Don’t let another hundred years go by without using insights such as the ‘spacing effect’ to help children in our classrooms. As I said at the opening of this chapter, there are many ways to fail an exam. Don’t let neglecting to teach your students to remember to pass be one of them.

Chapter 26
How are you smart?
    Of all the ideas to come out of a university and into classrooms over the last 30 years, surely the one that has produced the most debate, the most controversy, the greatest amount of printed material and spoken words has to be the theory of Multiple Intelligences as put forward by Harvard professor Howard Gardner in 1983.
    And rightly so in my book (which this is).
    Although there are many detractors from his theory, some of whom I am convinced are driven more by academic jealousy over Gardner’s ‘academic rock star’ status than anything else, I have seen nothing to rival the theory’s ability to open up learning to huge numbers of otherwise disenfranchised people, people for whom the narrow IQ view of intelligence would otherwise have consigned them to a life of ignorant thick-ness! When it comes to democratizing learning – the ‘dumbing up’ I mentioned in chapter 10 – the effective understanding and use of MI theory has no equal.
    One of the ways of muddying the waters over MI is in the actual definition of both what is intelligence and also what is
an
intelligence? Gardner admits that ‘this is not as simple a matter as I’d like it to be’, adding that proponents of his MI theory ‘have used the term “intelligence” in a variety of ways and I myself have added to the confusion’. In his 1993 book
Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice
he tries to clarify matters and defines an intelligence as what he calls ‘a biophysical potential’, something he goes on to describe as follows:
    All members of the species have the potential to exercise a set of intellectual faculties of which the species is capable.
    (Gardner 1993)
    In other words, we are all born with – and can further develop – a range of potential abilities, a range that includes verbal, physical, social, intrapersonal, visual, logical, musical and naturalistic