Welcome to LearnLawBetter.
Not sure why your grades aren’t where you want them to be?
Do you know the material, yet your not getting top grades.
Stay to the end, as I explain the difference between knowing and understanding, and provide
you with some tips on what you can do things differently to bridge this divide.
Now don’t forget to hit the like button if you enjoy this episode, and click the subscribe
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Hi, this is Beau Baez, and today I want to discuss the difference between knowing and
understanding.
I can’t tell you the number of times that a student has come into my office, convinced
that they know the material.
But after a few minutes of conversation, I realize that what they have is a superficial
knowledge—not the deep knowledge they need to do well on the exam.
One of the languages I read is ancient Greek.
The other day I came across two Greeks words for knowing.
One was gnosis, which is translated knowledge.
The other word is epignosis, which we might translate as precise knowledge, deep knowledge,
or better yet, understanding.
As you can see, epignosis builds on the word gnosis.
What you need to do is move beyond gnosis into epignosis.
Now here is the problem: you don’t know what you don’t know.
In other words, you might honestly believe that you know something, but not really knowing.
In the book Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, the authors state that
“the truth is that we’re all hardwired to make errors in judgment.
Good judgment is a skill one must acquire.”
Now let’s look at some tips to help you begin acquiring those skills.
One, pretend you don’t understand.
If you act like you are unsure of the material, you will approach an exam differently than
if you are over confident.
The student who believes he knows the material tends to write answers that are superficial.
In comparison, the unsure student is more careful in what he writes, making sure to
spend time explaining everything so that he doesn’t miss anything.
Two, use the Elaborative Interrogation exam preparation technique.
You take the material you are studying, and begin to ask questions about everything you
know.
You ask how one concept connects to another concept, helping you to find gaps in your
knowledge.
Three, practice tests.
It is essential that you take many practice exams.
This will expose gaps in your knowledge, and help direct you in what you need to study.
Now by taking practice exams, I mean that you must also find a way to get feedback on
what you are doing.
Ideally, your professor is the best person to give you feedback, but most professors
are too busy.
Your school might have an academic support department, and if not that, you must find
some other students that you can get together with to do practice exams.
Four, after an exam, meet with your professor.
Don’t view the final exam as the end of your learning journey in that class.
Even though a course is over, you can still learn lots of valuable information from your
professor.
Much of what you do on an exam has nothing to do with the content of the course.
Most of your grade comes from other factors, like analytical and organizational skills.
This is why the IRAC method is so important in legal education.
Five, keep reviewing all the material.
A common mistake is for students to stop practicing something once they believe they have mastered
the material.
Don’t do that.
Instead, create flash cards and use the Leitner boxes to keep reviewing the material throughout
the term.
Let me leave you with this from Make it Stick: “As humans we are readily misled by illusions,
cognitive biases, and the stories that we construct to explain the world around us and our place
within it.
To become more competent … we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in
others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don’t know, adopt
learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.”
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