In a recent training with Kelly Harmon, we learned about declarative knowledge versus procedural knowledge. We were given released state test items and part of our task was to identify what declarative knowledge they needed and what procedural knowledge students needed. Since this task stretched my brain, it led me to research more about declarative versus procedural knowledge and other types of knowledge in general.
Declarative knowledge is facts or information that is stored in memory. It can be characteristics, steps or procedures, names, vocabulary and so on. It is what we want students to KNOW. Procedural knowledge is what we want students to be able to DO such as how to ride a bike. In math that would relate to solving a problem with a certain procedure or formula, as well solving problems in the calculator.
It got me thinking about the ways in which we assess students in a secondary math classroom. An important part of math is recalling facts and information from the declarative knowledge list yet out assessments tend to measure the procedural knowledge. How many times do we ask students math vocabulary or characteristics? I used to consider this to be low level where as the procedural side was higher level thinking but not I am not sure. If you read the different theories out there they have differing viewpoints if one comes before the other or if you can do procedural without declarative etc. I thought about writing a linear equation, for example, and based on given information students should know which linear form to use. I expected my students to know which form and always assessed their equation, but never just asked them to write which form to use and why. If I were to assess students on declarative knowledge then I should have them practice retrieving it also.
A colleague of mine, Ashley Taplin, showed me a retrieval practice she created that is focused on declarative knowledge and prior knowledge students would need for solving quadratics and I loved it. She also introduced me to the hashtag retrievalpractice on twitter where I discovered many different ways teachers asses and activate declarative knowledge. It led me to create some algebra 1 resources for declarative knowledge that recalls important information for the entire course. I plan to keep researching ways to interact with the different types of knowledge and hope to incorporate it in unit trainings when teachers analyze released test questions.
If you have any ways you use declarative versus procedural knowledge in your classroom I would love to hear about it!
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