Part 3: Organizing Knowledge

The brain doesn’t do a very good job of handling vast amounts of disorganized information. This is the reason for grocery lists, appointment calendars, numbers programmed into cell phones, CliffsNotes™, cockpit checklists, and jingles such as, “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

Textbook-style history does, in fact, have organizers. Dates, presidencies, economic trends and cycles, wars, regions, eras, and so on work for some people. Others organize history like beads on a string, with event “A” linking to event “B,” then “B” linking to “C,” and so on.

The problem with these and similar organizers is that they all rely primarily on memory rather than on logic and familiar experience. What learners need is a single, simple, logical, easily remembered way to organize and make sense of large amounts of information.

Here’s a classroom experiment we’ve tried a few times: We chose a student, then said, “Name as many games as you can, as fast as you can.” As the student reeled off names, we made tally marks on the board. We stopped when the student paused for two or three seconds.

We pointed out to the class that the student actually knew the name of far more games. Then we began again, but this time asked the student for the names of children’s games, computer games, party games, card games, sidewalk games, television games, board games, sports, etc. And, of course, the number of tally marks using this approach far exceeded the first total.

This illustrates the mental power of “organizing trees;” hierarchical ways of arranging information into categories, subcategories, and sub-subcategories. A study of doctors in Canada some years ago revealed that their success in diagnosing medical conditions depended, more than anything else, on the elaboration and sophistication of their hierarchical mental models for organizing diagnostic information.

Building information trees is an essential step in learning anything. Understanding grows as these trees are expanded and elaborated. These trees are especially important in dealing with complexity, and nothing can be more complex than history’s reality.

In the Investigation that follows, students analyze a primary source to classify the information buried within the document.