Ensuring that students truly understand—that they can use knowledge appropriately in new situations—is very difficult, said Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University and author of Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. "Understanding is elusive across the curriculum," he asserted.
- Short-answer assessments. "In the real world," he said, "you've got to figure out what the choices are."
- The text-test context. Often in school, students read a text, then take a test on the content. A student who scores well might truly understand, or she might just be "a good memorizer and mimicker."
- The correct answer compromise. Too often, students and teachers reach a tacit agreement not to push each other too hard, Gardner said.
- Pressures for coverage. Gardner termed this obstacle "the biggest villain" of all. In a World History course, for example, "you've got only so many weeks to get from Plato to NATO," he said. "If you don't succeed, you feel very inadequate. However, we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that what's sacrificed is understanding."
When students are young, Gardner said, they develop powerful theories about the world—for example, that a heavy object falls faster than a light one. Many of these theories are incorrect or inadequate, yet "very hard to shake."
What does it take to alter these "early engravings" on the mind? To revise students' naive theory about falling objects, teachers must ensure that students "really get their head around the issues of weight and density and friction and acceleration," Gardner said. "Those are not things that you can learn from reading a list of facts or definitions in the dictionary or encyclopedia. They really require wrestling with the topic."