Roger Schank Quote
There are endless books about what every third grader must know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don't understand what they are about, but it does not follow from that thatthe solution is to ram that knowledge down kids' throats and then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to make the stories understandable to them.
Roger Schank
There are endless books about what every third grader must know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don't understand what they are about, but it does not follow from that thatthe solution is to ram that knowledge down kids' throats and then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to make the stories understandable to them.
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About Roger Schank
Roger Carl Schank (March 12, 1946 – January 29, 2023) was an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within the context of natural language understanding) and case-based reasoning, both of which challenged cognitivist views of memory and reasoning. He began his career teaching at Yale University and Stanford University. In 1989, Schank was granted $30 million in a ten-year commitment to his research and development by Andersen Consulting, through which he founded the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University in Chicago.