Martin Turner shared a link.
Danielle Bradley has a great post on her blog: Betrayed – Three Things to Memorise.
Quite a few people in our unit, including Dani, were quite shocked to hear me talking about memorising in the Study Guide … rote-learning was the very thing a number of people managed to ‘escape from’ in ACCT11059, as you became aware of different ways of learning from a very simplistic (and ineffective for most people) approach of a vague quantitative increase in knowledge.
Well, there is ‘good’ memorising and ‘bad’ memorising … just like we will see in ACCT13017 Financial Statement Analysis (the capstone unit at the very last term of our Bachelor of Accounting degree) that there is ‘good’ debt and ‘bad’ debt.
With memorising, it all comes down to our motivation; why are we memorising? Are we memorising something with the intention of simply being able to reproduce it in an assessment and then promptly forget it (‘bad’ memorising); or are we memorising something with the intention of helping us to understand the concepts we are studying (‘good’ memorising)?
In the West (i.e. countries like Australia) memorising is usually done for ‘bad’ motivations. In some Asian countries and some other countries, memorising can more often be done as a stepping stone towards understanding … ‘good’ memorising.
So we need to change our attitude or motivation with memorising … do not do ‘bad’ memorising … hehe … just do ‘good’ memorising, which can be one of the powerful tools in our ‘real’ learning arsenal.
Memorising the ‘Three Things to Memorise’ can support us throughout our degree (including the rest of this unit) to reflect on and understand key aspects and issues with some of the topics we will be studying … including Inventory next week.
And I did not want to introduce the idea of ‘memorising’ in ACCT11059, as I was wanting to encourage you in ACCT11059 to make the – often difficult – switch to active, deep and real learning. But for those who have made (or started to make) the switch to learning for understanding, why not add in the skill and discipline of memorising to help you understand, really understand, more deeply understand … and help you change the way we view aspects of the world, and to change as a person in different (and often very important) ways.
How can memorising help us understand? How can it do this….?
Martin Turner Accounting 