18th October 2019 14:47
By Blue Tutors
Learning by rote is something regularly looked down upon by tutors. When there is the opportunity to help students understand their work really well, simply working on memorising material always feels like a lazy shortcut, something which will might help to get a pass, but won’t get the more difficult marks to take you to the top grade. Indeed, at A Level learning by rote is far less effective than it can be at GCSE.
Is there ever a situation when memorising is the best approach? Clearly some things need to be memorised, and for some subjects repetition can be absolutely essential. Linguists will tell you that vocabulary has to be repeated many times to be cemented and medics lament the hours of looking at diagrams to ensure they have instant recall of human anatomy.
What about situations where there might be two options, memorising or understanding in more depth? When trying to understand something we naturally remember things about that subject; a topic debated and argued over is better recalled than reading someone else’s argument. There is also the comfort one can take in understanding, or beginning to understand a subject and feeling on the, sometimes long, path to becoming an expert.
It’s possible that learning by rote will be marginally better or marginally worse when it’s 12 hours before an exam and we’re just trying to cram as much into our heads as possible, but what we can probably all agree on is that this is marginal; we’re looking at a short term solution to “hack” an exam.
As soon as we begin to look long term, understanding, and not memorising, is obviously the best way to learn. We often find that students who do well in their GCSEs after learning by rote, really struggle at A Level when they have to understand topics in more depth. Tutors always need to consider the reason a student is sitting in front of them. In almost every case, it won’t be to remember a huge amount of material and then drop the subject completely.