A guest blog from Dr Jenny Shipway, who studied biochemistry at university and now works in science communication and education training.
What teachers don’t tell you about A level Biology
Your teachers will take you through the course material. Hopefully you’ll be able to follow what they’re saying, and maybe you’ll copy down notes in class and then make flashcards to help you remember these things.
But that’s not enough to get a good grade. There are some things you need that teachers don’t tell you – because … well, they can’t. Some things can’t be told.
Into the Brain
The only way for a teacher to get things into your brain is to try to squeeze information in via your senses, and that’s pretty limited in what it can achieve even when you’re doing your best to pay attention.
The simple facts and concepts that you are served by teachers and books are just ingredients that you’re going to need to use to construct your own understanding of the topic.
This next step happens inside your own brain. Nobody can help you with this and it takes active mental effort. It’s not (just) about ‘memorising’ things, this is about constructing deeper meaning from the simple bits of information that you have taken in.
You know that ‘oh NOW I get it’ feeling - when you suddenly understand something that was just a list of information before? And suddenly it all makes sense? That’s what you need to be aiming for throughout your studies.
Too many facts
Your brain can memorise seemingly limitless facts and information for later recall. Things that could be put on a flashcard, like “RNA is single stranded”, or “water is polar”.
Some people think this will be enough. After all, surely everything in the textbook is there? Well, in a way yes. But there’s a big problem in that there are just so many of them. Although your brain can remember as much as it wants, there is a hard limit to how many bits of information your brain can juggle at one time when working new things out.
To answer the more-complex exam questions you would need to recall many many individual words, facts and concepts, and make sense of how these interact with each other, all at the same time as working out what the question is actually asking, and then processing the information it presents to produce your answer.
This isn’t possible because you have a limited working memory – the bit of your brain capacity that consciously processes things. You will feel completely overwhelmed.
A Deeper Understanding
The way the brain gets around this this problem is by its (amazing!) ability to process information to create a deeper understanding of a topic. This deeper understanding is not a list of facts and cannot easily be defined. You can think of it like a capacity of the brain to process new information on that topic. (Psychologists call it a “schema”.)
If I say: “Imagine a fluffy dog” … you just do it. Effortlessly. You don’t have to struggle to recall every fact you’ve ever heard about what a dog is, and what fluffy is, and pull all of these things together on the fly. Instead, the only things you need in your working memory are “fluffy” and “dog”. Because both of these come with an inbuilt deep understanding.
Contructing Meaning
So how do you go from a group of facts to a deeper understanding?
It takes mental effort. You need to slow down and avoid skipping over things that are uncomfortable. To check that all those different facts and concepts fit together properly, that they make sense in how they interact with each other. You need time just thinking about the topic, looking at it from different angles, testing your understanding, checking that everything about the topic links together properly and makes sense at every scale (and also in relation to other topics you have learned).
Ask yourself: do you have a real understanding of this topic? Or do you just have a list of facts that you are sticking together?
The really good news is that when you do get it (“Oh NOW I understand!”) everything will suddenly become so much easier and less overwhelming. It’ll also make it easier to remember the associated facts and jargon, because they’ll be anchored by something really strong.
Test yourself
You know when teachers say “explain in your own words”? That’s because they don’t want you to repeat a set definition you’ve memorised from the text book, but rather they want you to demonstrate your own understanding of the topic.
If you really understand something, you’ll have a thousand different ways you could explain it. If I asked you what a dog is, you’d never give me the same explanation twice – there are so many different ways to approach that question. And you can answer it in different ways because you’d be processing a deep understanding rather than just repeating back something you memorised.
How many different ways, from how many different directions, could you explain the biology topic you’re currently studying?
Success in Exams
So many students lament that “I know the content, I just have trouble answering exam questions”. They are hoping for some quick-fix ‘exam technique’ but in nearly all cases the issue is that they simply lack the deeper understanding the questions demand.
Without an understanding of the topic, you’ll be drowning in facts at best. And just coughing up a pile of facts related to the topic won’t be enough to get you through.
With a deeper understanding, you’ll be able to confidently recognise what exam questions are about. You will have the spare mental capacity to process the required information to produce high quality answers. And as a bonus, you are less likely to make ‘silly’ mistakes.
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