Do Your Students Learn by Rote? Or Can They Recognize Patterns?

A question confronts many professors at the start of each semester: Which of their students can grasp a subject’s underlying concepts, and which are simply adept at memorizing? Both kinds of students might complete a problem set or ace a quiz, but for very different reasons.

A new method developed by professors of chemistry and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis may be able to identify which of these two thinking patterns — often called rule-based and rote-based learning — students tend to use. Those who tend to think abstractly about underlying rules also tended to perform well in their chemistry courses, particularly at the upper levels, the scholars found.

In a recent issue of the Journal of Chemical Education (requires subscription), Regina F. Frey, a professor of STEM education and an associate professor of chemistry, and Mark A. McDaniel, a professor of psychological and brain sciences, outlined how the task they’ve designed can reveal students’ thinking patterns by asking them to make predictions about two fictional elements in a fictional organism.

The results of the scholars’ research suggest that rule-based (or abstraction) learners consistently performed better in general- and organic-chemistry courses, even after controlling for their academic preparation.

Ms. Frey and Mr. McDaniel, who also lead Washington University’s Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education, wrote the article with their colleague Michael J. Cahill. They spoke with The Chronicle about how their work can shed light on students’ thinking habits and how faculty members can move students from being memorizers (also known as instance- or exemplar-based thinkers) into those who look for underlying patterns.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: As someone who teaches chemistry in a classroom, what do you see as the difference between rote- and rule-based learning?

Ms. Frey: We see two types of students. There are those who can do the homework and answer the problems and are very conscientious — but when they get to exam problems, and there are some that are applications of what they’ve seen before or are a stretch, those students who learn by rote say, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And the reason is they’ve really learned a certain procedure or a certain example. We have other students who do the homework, and what they’re doing is learning the underlying concepts and theories. So they look at a problem and they say, “Oh, this is a problem that is an atomic-spectroscopy problem. What does that mean to me underneath?” Before you go into the exam or a quiz or something, you really can’t tell the difference between these two students.

Mr. McDaniel: The exciting thing from the laboratory perspective is that we’ve been finding in our work that learners seem to be somewhat persistent in their orientation. If they take an instance-based approach on one kind of conceptual problem, they seem to take that approach on a very different kind of conceptual problem. If the student takes an abstraction-based approach, they seem to take that approach on a very different kind of laboratory problem. We’re now having the sense that the tendency of a student seems to be extending from the laboratory into really authentic, complex learning of STEM concepts, or at least chemistry concepts. We think we’ve gained some power in anticipating the way they’re going to approach their learning.

Q: So, in other words, students tend to be one or the other — is that what you’re finding?

Ms. Frey: For the most part. But we found that there’s a subset of students who switched learning approaches. One-third of the students stayed abstraction learners, one-third of the students stayed exemplar learners, and about a third of the students switched.

Q: How much of this is what the student brings to the table, and how much of this can be shaped by the instructor? What kinds of teaching practices tend to foster abstract, conceptually based kinds of thinking?

Ms. Frey: We have an active-learning method that we use here — it’s nationwide, it’s not ours — peer-led team learning. or PLTL.

Q: Can you briefly describe what that is?

Ms. Frey: The students meet weekly in groups of six or eight to do problems they haven’t seen before. They’re facilitated by a trained undergraduate who is not a tutor but is trained to ensure that the students equally participate and discuss the problems. They don’t tell them whether the answer is right or wrong. They’re helping them discuss among themselves how to solve the problems and why they’re solved that way. Students who are in PLTL perform better than those who are not in PLTL. According to our preliminary data, we’ve found that even though PLTL helps everyone, it helps these flexible learners to a very large extent.

Q: How much?

Ms. Frey: It takes them from being the lowest-performing students in general chemistry (and we’ve taken into account their preparation, as measured by ACT scores). It takes them from the lowest performers up to equal the highest performers, which are the abstraction learners.

Q: Are there cases where an instance-based or rote-learning approach might be a good idea?

Mr. McDaniel: In making this distinction, we want to be careful not to add a label or a value judgment. In some contexts, instance-based learning is also valuable.

Ms. Frey: To be successful, both are important. Let me give you an example about my son. In third grade you probably remember memorizing your multiplication tables. My son went to a nontraditional school; they taught him that multiplication was addition: three times five is really five plus five plus five. They didn’t make him memorize. He really quickly got that concept, and that made perfect sense to him. I said to him, “I’m really happy you got that concept, but you cannot go on and do fractions and division if you don’t do your multiplication tables.” At some point there are certain things that need to be rote.

Q: What are some ways that professors in different disciplines, in both STEM and beyond, might make use of your work?

Mr. McDaniel: We need to show that this kind of relationship between those two orientations extends to other disciplines, and we’re working on that now. But let’s assume they do. If they do, our hope would be that one could use this basic laboratory concept-problem or task as a way to help identify students who are going to tend to memorize in class and, as a consequence, maybe not perform well on exam questions that require generalization. … What we’re suggesting wouldn’t necessarily be a huge barrier to instructors in large classes. Students could be given problems that would give them practice identifying underlying concepts, problems that seem very different on the surface. We’re doing this in our physics course right now: Instructors designed quizzes or exercises in which students see very different kinds of physics problems on the surface, and they’re not required to solve the problem. Instead, the students are required to answer, What’s the underlying principle?

Ms. Frey: If you listen to students, they’ll say, “If you tell me the first step, then I can solve it.” That’s basically saying, “If you tell me the concept, then I can solve it.” What we’re saying is they certainly need to practice solving, but they do enough of that. What they need to practice is: Here’s the problem, what’s the concept?

Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.