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  Box 3: Why Memorisation is Helpful for More Than Tests

  Humans have a working memory, which is the cognitive structure in which processing occurs – in other words, this is where you process things that you are consciously thinking about. You also know an awful lot of things that you are not thinking about at any one time: your address, the name of your first pet, the lyrics to ‘Rocket Man’, etc. – these are stored in your long-term memory. When you have to recall the name of your first pet because you set it as the answer to your security question and you’ve forgotten your password, you retrieve it from your long-term memory, and process it in your working memory, like taking something out of your kitchen cupboard where you’ve stored it, to use it at your kitchen counter.

  Things also enter your working memory through your environment. You see an advert for a new toothbrush that impresses you, or you look up the different types of rock on Google to help you with a geography assignment. You can pop next door to the corner shop for an ingredient you didn’t have and add it to your kitchen counter. It does have a limited capacity though – you can only hold so many things in your working memory at any one time, just like you can only fit so many ingredients on your counter. If you’ve just looked up a phone number on your phone, and you’re trying to hold it in your mind between hearing it and dialling it, it’s pretty annoying if someone asks you a question – you’re likely to forget the number (the memory decays) and have to look it up again. It also doesn’t have great sticking power – if you don’t repeat the phone number over and over in your head, you’re likely to have forgotten it in about 30 seconds. For the sake of my kitchen analogy, I’d like you to imagine that if you leave your new ingredients unattended for more than 30 seconds, your dog comes along and eats them (this doesn’t happen for the stuff from your cupboards though, because there’s space to store them back on the shelf whenever you’re not using them).

  Let’s return to our Japanese children, who’ve learnt their times tables and their number facts. These are now in their long-term memory, and they can retrieve them with ease and bring them into their working memory whenever they need to. Their teacher has asked them to solve a maths problem:

  If a cake is cut into 12 pieces, how many pieces would you need to eat to have 1/3 of the cake left?

  They are thinking hard about how to solve this, and they have been taught about equivalent fractions, so see that they need to work out how many twelfths would be equivalent to 1/3 and then take 12 away from this value. They know they need to work out the lowest common multiple of 12 and 3, and because they easily recall from their long-term memory that 3x4=12, they know that the lowest common multiple is 12 and that they

  therefore need to multiply the numerator by 4. So 4/12 is the same as 1/3, which means that the next step is 12-4=8, leaving them with the conclusion that you need to eat 8 pieces. Someone who did not immediately know that 3x4=12 would struggle to find the lowest common multiple. They’d get side-tracked with trying out which multiples both numbers went into using their calculator, and in the meantime, they would have forgotten the other steps they’d decided to take, as it would have decayed from their working memory.90 It wouldn’t only take them longer, it would be a more difficult and demotivating process.

  If you’re trying to follow a recipe to make a cake, but at every stage of the recipe you need to pop next door to get more ingredients, it takes you longer. It is also additionally difficult if you pop out for butter, only to find the dog has eaten the eggs you so carefully whisked. Now imagine you don’t have a recipe at all – you’ve just been asked to make a cake, and discover the method for yourself. It’s going to take you a little while, but if you’ve got all the ingredients there, your trials and errors aren’t going to be as disastrous as if you have to go out at every step and potentially buy the wrong ones. That is why it is helpful to stock up your shelves with the kinds of ingredients that are used in the kind of baking that you do.

  On the other hand, if the teacher only got the students to memorise the facts, and didn’t ever give them the opportunity to apply their knowledge to novel situations, they would struggle to deal with any problems that didn’t follow exactly the same pattern as ones they’d learnt the solutions for. And if Japanese teachers do err on one side or the other, it is this side on which they err. Even now, more than 15 years after problem-solving approaches in Japanese schools were supposedly typical, one Japanese primary school teacher I spoke to at a BBQ said: ‘The education system we’ve taught in for a long time is where the teachers just teach; a one-way education. Nowadays we have to bring in active learning, but there aren’t many people who can do it. We’ve started learning how to do it but we’re slow, especially in Osaka.’ This is clearly something she and teachers in her school aspire to, rather than something which has been established across Japan for more than a decade.91

  Nevertheless, Japanese students do particularly well in PISA’s international tests of problem-solving (defined as the ‘capacity to engage in cognitive processing to understand and resolve problem situations where a method of solution is not immediately obvious’), better even than their high scores in maths, science and reading would lead one to expect, and more than any other country apart from Singapore and Korea. Perhaps the problem-solving tasks that are embedded in some (even if not all) Japanese lessons help contribute to this ability.

  While it is impossible to say for sure what teaching approach leads to what outcomes, there is some evidence to show that these approaches are beneficial. The original TIMSS study in 1995 on which Stigler and Hiebert’s observations were based included a questionnaire for students on how often reasoning tasks happened in their lessons (defined as: ‘explaining the reasoning behind an idea; using tables, charts or graphs to represent and analyse relationships; working on problems for which there is no immediately obvious solution and/or writing equations to represent relationships’). Japanese students reported that they did this in their lessons more than American students did, and the frequency with which they did this made a difference of 14 TIMSS test points within Japan, and 19 points within America.92

  This suggests that these reasoning tasks could contribute to some of the difference between the two countries’ scores, if only a small proportion of it (the gap was about 100 points, and a quarter of American teachers already used these types of tasks frequently). It is important to remember that these reasoning approaches in Japanese lessons are discrete, highly-structured to ensure students have the required prior knowledge, and are introduced with a particular goal in mind. Used in this structured way, problem-solving approaches seem to be beneficial to mathematics scores, and perhaps even more general problem-solving skills too.

  Lessons for the Rest of the World

  Rather than assuming that one particular approach to teaching is the best in all situations, Japanese teachers have a number of teaching strategies in their repertoire, and every activity within each lesson is carefully chosen with the goal of the lesson in mind. When I asked Mr Hashimoto about the use of group work in Japanese schools, and why they did it (despite the challenges it presents for awkward teenagers) he said, ‘There are lots of different aims for it. The teacher decides which student characteristics or abilities they want to improve through the group learning, before they begin. They never just introduce group work for the sake of it, there is always an aim.’ The methods chosen for each lesson are based on the question, ‘What is the best method to teach this idea?’

  Whichever methods they choose, Japanese teachers have an edge on developing students’ conceptual understanding for a number of underlying reasons. The first is the practice of ‘lesson study’, which is common in Japanese elementary schools across the country. I first came across this concept when I was invited to watch a lesson in which 10 teachers and a video camera were squeezed in to the back of an otherwise normal-looking classroom. My palms would be sweating if I were being observed by so many teachers, because observations in England are usual
ly an assessment of your ability as a teacher, and end with a grading on a scale of 1–4. This teacher looked calm though, and I later learned that they have a different type of observation for lesson study in Japan where the focus is on watching how the students are responding to the lesson, so that the teachers can communally feed back on the effectiveness of the lesson plan. But it’s even less scary than that – four or five of the teachers sat at the back of the room were involved in planning the lesson with the teacher in the first place, so the teacher isn’t even being judged on their planning.

  This lesson study approach has a number of advantages beyond the prevention of sweaty palms. Expert teachers feed into all lesson plans, allowing younger teachers to learn from them and avoid the lesson disasters that I unintentionally created in my first year of teaching. The carefully designed, evaluated and tweaked lesson plans are stored centrally so that teachers rarely have to plan from scratch, just edit to suit their particular class. And the regular conversations about the best way to teach a lesson ensure that teachers at all levels are thinking about their practice, rather than growing stale after many years of teaching the same thing.

  In their research, Stevenson and Stigler were curious about this lesson study process, and asked a teacher, ‘What do you talk about?’ The teacher stopped marking and thought for a moment. ‘A great deal of time,’ she reported, ‘is spent talking about questions we can pose to the class – which wordings work best to get students involved in thinking and discussing the material. One good question can keep a whole class going for a long time; a bad one produces little more than a simple answer.’93 A teacher I spoke with amazed me with the level of detail in which she had planned; for the introduction of a particular maths topic she explained that the number 23 should be used in the example she first shared with the students, as it wouldn’t introduce misconceptions or require new maths the students hadn’t learnt yet, whereas using the number 24 would. This detailed approach to lesson planning is why I believe that the level of planning evident in the lessons analysed by Stigler and Hiebert was not simply due to the presence of the video camera.

  Another advantage that Japanese teachers have, in common with teachers in Shanghai and Singapore, is time. Ask American teachers to plan to that level of detail with their colleagues and they would laugh in your face – they have the longest teaching hours of all the countries that entered the TALIS survey, at 26.8 per week.94 In Japan however, it’s 17.7 – equivalent to about three-and-a-half hours a day, which is made possible by their larger class sizes. According to Andreas Schleicher – the man in charge of PISA – most countries have this trade-off between class size and teaching time, with either larger classes but fewer lessons, or smaller classes but more lessons. Primary school teachers in the UK unfortunately have neither fewer lessons nor smaller classes, due to student-teacher ratios being substantially higher than average (21 children per teacher, compared to an OECD average of 15).95

  Japanese teachers also have more time on each topic to ensure the children have a thorough understanding of it before they move on, because of the way the curriculum is set out. The Japanese have a national curriculum – content that all students should be taught laid out by subject and by year group. This curriculum is demanding, in that at least in some subjects it covers more difficult content by age 15 than either the English or American curriculum do.96 And yet it actually covers fewer concepts per year; the textbooks are skinnier, containing about 10 topics a year for maths and science rather than the 30 or 40 covered in America.

  How can this possibly lead to a more demanding curriculum? Surely this means it is easier? No. Japanese teachers have the time to cover concepts in depth, and don’t move on to the next topic until students have mastered the first. The expectations placed on parents to supervise their children’s homework and help them when they are stuck make this more achievable than it might be elsewhere. And because each topic is covered in depth, they don’t then need to reteach the same concepts in later years as they would if they’d rushed through them, meaning they can subsequently move on to more difficult topics.

  The government is actually concerned with defining a maximum content for the textbooks that should be mastered as well as a minimum that should be covered, so for example, one textbook publisher was asked to remove the label ‘cow dung’ from a picture of a cow eating grass in the sunshine, lest it gave the impression that the students had to cover the whole of the nitrogen cycle at that stage.97 I was impressed by this – one of my frustrations as a teacher in England was having to cover lots of content in time for the exam, sometimes ignoring students’ important but curriculum-irrelevant questions in doing so. Japanese primary school teachers don’t have to do this, because their curriculum in each subject is narrow but deep.

  This approach gives the teachers time to bring most of the students with them as they move through the curriculum. The idea is that everyone will understand and move forward together, rather than accepting or expecting that some will race ahead or fall behind. This was evident in one of my conversations with Mr Hashimoto, when I asked him what teachers did if students were falling behind.

  ‘To be honest – say in maths – if a student is behind in maths when they are in second grade of junior high, it is quite difficult to get them to catch up again.’ The implication being that this is unusual rather than the norm. ‘But what the teachers would do is to try to make the lessons really dense, if that makes sense. Trying to make the best lessons they can make.’ So rather than splitting the class into different groups within the lesson, and accepting that some students will just have to do easier work, the teachers make the lessons as efficient as possible to cover whatever the students were behind on, in addition to what they were learning for the first time. Differentiation with different activities for different students is not a focus. It is not a focus to the extent that Juliet’s girls, who spoke fluent English, still had to sit through English classes and do the same activities as the rest of the class. What Mr Hashimoto didn’t say, but I saw happen, was that teachers also support students who are struggling outside of class. Japanese students have a 10 to 15-minute break in between all of their lessons, and at the end of each class the teacher would often stay at the front desk and talk through things with individual students.

  An account of the Japanese education system wouldn’t be complete, though, without giving a mention to juku (private ‘cram school’) and the role they play in catering to students of different abilities. When a student is struggling with a particular subject and their parents can’t help them, many go to classes after school to continue their lessons. Students who want to get ahead and extend their learning go too, as does almost everyone that is studying to take the university entrance test. Students don’t only go because their parents make them – juku is seen by many children as a social activity, and a place to make new friends.98 Kunio Kijima, head of a private association of jukus and director of his own juku chain, believes that public schools often bore the smartest students and leave the weakest students behind.99 ‘Our goal is to help all kids get ahead,’ he said. In countries without such private tuition options (or the parents willing to pay for them), these students would need to be supported by a public alternative or by school teachers, as they are in Finland.

  Relaxed Education

  At the beginning of the 1990s, students all attended school on Saturday too, and more children attended juku. However, as Japan became more self-aware, the Japanese became concerned that students were working too hard, and that they lacked the ability to learn and think for themselves. The government therefore decided that the students needed ‘room to grow’ – yutori kyõiku – and so over the course of the late 1990s and early 2000s, they cut the curriculum down by a third, reduced the number of Saturdays that children had to be at school (eventually eliminating this practice completely) and introduced a period of ‘integrated studies’ in which students would be given time to pursue studies of their own interest.


  Hannah started school just before this yutori kyõiku was introduced, and Lily and Maya followed her straight into this ‘relaxed education’. They tell tales of going into the nearby forest with the class to search for wild boar tracks, and learning about the plants and different types of bark. They described how they’d visit the local shrine and learn about its history. (They also told me that one teacher used to stick his knuckles into the heads of naughty boys – a reminder that what is officially decreed by the government doesn’t always make its way down into schools, even in law-abiding Japan.)

  In a move that was quite unusual for the normally prescriptive Department for Education, how the integrated studies were delivered was left largely up to schools. The aim of the programme was to allow students to work independently, and follow their own interests to encourage their individuality – but how much school time was allocated to the programme and what topics were to be covered was not decreed. This went a step further than teachers introducing structured problem-solving into lessons – this time the problems to solve and the questions to investigate were (in most cases) up to the children. The elementary school students loved it. They liked the choice, the open-endedness of the tasks (which are otherwise rarely seen in Japanese schools) and the fact that the content wasn’t examined.100