My favorite part in Catcher in the Rye is where Holden Caulfield visits the Museum of Natural History. He finds it reassuring because the exhibits stay the same while he is different every year he returns.

The technique of spiral review is like this. The material is the same and the student revisits it periodically. And with every visit, the student learns more deeply and thoroughly. This is due to two, interrelated mechanisms called “assimilation” and “accommodation.”

Every time a learner revisits material, she reprocesses it; she “rechews” it; she “thinks it through again.” In other words, she assimilates, or “digests,” more than she did on her last pass.

Then, she accommodates, or incorporates, the material into her brain structure, which has already been altered from the last experiences with the material. New neural connections are made and existing connections are strengthened.

So, with every loop of a spiral review, the student is processing the material more thoroughly and then incorporating it into a brain more ready to receive it. The student’s grasp of the material becomes more accurate and more permanent with every revisit.

Sometimes we use the phrases “surface knowledge” and “deep knowledge” to distinguish between things we know in a perfunctory way and things we know inside-and-out. To be an expert on something implies that one has deep knowledge, from long experience with the subject matter in his field. This deep knowledge, this expertise, came from repeated exposure to and use of, the body of knowledge. It came from spiral review.

I see the difference in surface knowledge and deep knowledge all the time in my students. How could I not? They are taught new concepts or procedures and then asked to apply them. This goes fairly well as long as demands remain modest. Most kids can, for example, apply new math procedures to the evening’s homework, so long as the homework sticks closely to the exact lesson they were taught. Where kids run into trouble is with the application of new procedures to novel situations; word problems, SAT problems, etc. What makes these sorts of problems “hard” is that they require kids to take knowledge that they only have on a shallow, surface level, and apply it as if they understood it deeply. The SAT, for example, doesn’t require any “hard” math; the way it creates “hard” problems is by piling several “easy” problems on top of each other. Every step in the solution is “easy,” yet, because many of these steps are only surface knowledge for the kids trying to do them, the result is an un-doably difficult problem.

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (January 25, 2010)

    Last reviewed: 24 Jan 2010