Why Do I Need to Know This?: The Classic Student Lament

Learning By Doing

Read the following passage, and do your best to remember all the essential information. And before you ask...yes, there will be a quiz at the end. Good luck!

The procedure is really quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups depending on their makeup. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo any particular endeavor. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than to do many. In the short run this may not seem important, but complications from doing too many can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. The manipulation of the appropriate mechamism should be self-explanatory, and we need not dwell on it here. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell.

Pop Quiz:

1. What is the first step?
2. What is the second step?
3. What might happen if you do too many things at once?
4. How will you know when you are done? 

Once you have taken a shot at answering the questions, feel free to look back at the passage to check your answers. If you had a difficult time with the quiz, why did you struggle? What was it about the passage that was hard to comprehend? What would have made it easier? When you were reading, did you stop and wonder, "What is the point of this?"

If you are an educator, then you have probably been asked, "Why do I need to know this?" or some variation therein [1]. How did you respond? Is there a reasonable answer to this question, and one that makes sense to a novice? In the post that follows, we will look at two possible responses.

Response #1: Remember there are no stupid questions, just stupid people. – Mr. Garrison, South Park

An easy, knee-jerk reaction to declare it a stupid question. Or, you could respond by saying: 

• You need to know this because any bright, upstanding student in a modern world should know these things. 
• As a voting citizen, you need to be informed of certain facts and have the ability to critically evaluate politicians' claims. 
• You don't want to be tricked as a consumer, and you should want to be able to make informed decisions.
• Or, perhaps the worst response of all: Because I said so!

Honestly, it might be impossible for you to answer the question because, as an educator, you might not know what the future holds for your students. 

For example, there is currently a huge demand for Data Scientists. As of this writing, there were 31,913 results when I searched for "data scientist" in the Jobs section of LinkedIn [2]. Every major corporation is interested in hiring someone who can apply Machine Learning to help solve their business problems. In fact, the concept of Deep Learning wasn't possible until about 10 years ago, and the advances since then have continued to accelerated. Therefore, it would be especially difficult to explain to a student that they need to know something when the technology that draws upon that body of knowledge hasn't been invented yet. Who knows what the hot job title is going to be in 10 years from now?

One way to address the Student Lament is to appeal to the unknown future and explain that knowledge is cumulative, and that there exists a prerequisite structure wherein higher-order concepts build upon foundational knowledge. For example, to understand Machine Learning it helps to know linear regression. If you want to tackle linear regression, then you might want to learn how to solve linear equations. To solve linear equations, it might help to understand ratios...and so on until you get to the most basic principles of counting.

Response #2: Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question. –E. E. Cummings

A second response to the Student Lament is that it is exactly the right question to ask, and students should never cease asking why they need to know something. Let's look back at the passage that opened this post. When you read it, did you feel like something was missing? What got in your way of comprehending the text?

In the original study that used this passage, the authors had three experimental conditions [3]. In the baseline condition, the authors had participants listen to the passage, and then they answered some recall and comprehension questions. As you might imagine, they did terribly. The second condition gave them a title to the passage, which was "Doing Laundry," only after they heard the passage. This group didn't fare any better than the baseline condition. However, the third condition was given the title before they heard the passage. That group did the best. Why? Because they had some context about what the passage was about. Providing the context allowed the participants to better comprehend what was being said.


The same is true for our students. They will most certainly do better if they understand how the current lesson fits in with the overall content of the course. It also helps to provide context because then they can draw upon their prior knowledge to better comprehend the current lesson. The passage about laundry is purposefully written so that the listener has to fill in the gaps with their prior knowledge.

The S.T.E.M. Connection

The goal of this exercise is to simulate being a clueless student, which should (hopefully) increase our empathy towards their plight of learning something new. How might that change our instruction? One simple method is to use a warm-up task. You can ask your students to work on a task that is a prerequisite to the upcoming Lesson. You could also show a curriculum map, and indicate where they currently are, and show where they are going. With the right visualization, this could be extremely empowering to the student because they can chart their progress through the sequence. It might also help them see connections between (seemingly) disparate concepts and ideas. 

As the passage that opened this post stated, "It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future." While certainly true for laundry, it might also be true for lesson planning!


Share and Enjoy!

Dr. Bob

Going Beyond the Information Given

[1] Another personal favorite is, "Is this going to be on the test?" Apparently, knowledge is only worthwhile unless one is tested on it!

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/?keywords=data%20scientist 

[3] Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1972). Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11(6), 717-726.