Bite-sized Theory—Procedural vs. Declarative Knowledge
Two questions:
- What does it mean to know something?
- What should you do if your clothes catch on fire?
Folks who study and design for learning find it helpful to make distinctions between qualitatively different ways of knowing. Two such categories are procedural and declarative knowledge.
Stop, drop, and roll!
Declarative knowledge is knowing about something. Telling a fact is a good way to demonstrate it. The declarative response to your clothes catching on fire is “Stop, drop, and roll!”. These are facts about best practices for extinguishing fire on your person. A catchy slogan or song is a good way to help you remember it.
In contrast, procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something. It’s often kind of a pain to express it in words. If I had to respond to the same question, it’d be something like this:
Slow my pace, then stop walking. Calmly inhale. Bend my knees while reaching for the ground with my dominant arm. Lay down on the ground quickly, but take care not to bang my head. Move dominant my arm and knee across my body rapidly to generate momentum, while tucking my head to allow myself to roll.
See? Describing it is annoying. Instead, doing a role-play or repeated practice is a much better way to help you remember this kind of knowledge.
If you’re like me, your elementary school teacher had you do both—and that’s great. Because honestly, I don’t pretend to catch on fire often enough to have that logged in muscle memory—but I might just remember to “Stop, drop, and roll!”
How do you help other people develop declarative and/or procedural knowledge?
Post-script for nerds: This Bite-sized Theory post was inspired by reading Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006). It’s a bit older, but they posit that adult language learners may have a qualitatively different way of processing syntax in real-time listening—it may be declarative, unlike their native language syntax processing which seems to be procedural (i.e. I may have to remember “how nouns work in French” as a set of facts rather vs. just “knowing how to use them” in English). Declarative recall is a little bit slower, so one implication is that even very advanced language learners seem to process syntax only shallowly during real-time listening, relying instead on what the pieces mean (lexical & semantic knowledge) and using that to make sense out of them. This is sort of the reverse of what children seem to do when comprehending their native language (rely heavily on syntax and engage only shallowly with the meaning of individual pieces). Fascinating.
