Myth Number Four: You can always just look it up

The advent of easily-accessed information thanks to Google has led to an even greater inclination to downplay the importance of general knowledge and memorization, along with a belief in the importance of good research skills. The teachers are not to transmit information, but rather to give their students the tools to access and evaluate information.

There are two reasons why this trend is problematic. The first was covered in the first myth - human brains have a very limited capacity to work with short-term (working) memory, being able to juggle only a few items at a time, and so need to have as much information as possible stored in long-term memory. "Looking something up on Google uses up that space in our working memory and means we do not have that space available to process the new information or to combine it with other information."

The second problem with an emphasis on research skills over memorized information is that you can't get much out of looking something up unless you already know quite a bit about it to begin with. 

"Imagine the typical dictionary entry for a word you do not know. It is often itself full of complex words and knowledge. Someone who already possesses a great deal of knowledge in their long-term memory will be able to make sense of the definition. However, someone who does not have this background knowledge will not be able to do so. This background knowledge is the schema that helps you make sense of new knowledge.

"This is why when we ask pupils to look things up in a dictionary or thesaurus we do not always get the intended results. The scientist George Miller used exactly this process to show why background knowledge matters. He asked a group of pupils to use a dictionary to learn new words. Their lack of knowledge about the words they were looking up rendered the process useless, if quite humorous. Some of the sentences they came up with will be familiar to anyone who has done a similar activity with pupils.

• "Mrs. Morrow stimulated the soup.' (That is, she stirred it up.)
• 'Our family erodes a lot.' (That is, they eat out.)
• 'Me and my parents correlate, because without them I wouldn't be here.'
• 'I was meticulous about falling off the cliff.'
• 'I relegated my pen pal's letter to her house.'"

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