An Inability to Communicate

Here's a problem I'm encountering more and more!

Learners know all the facts but are rubbish at communicating their knowledge!

All the time I come across this and it is getting worse (in my opinion) - if I ask a learner loads of questions about haemolytic disease of the newborn (HDN) then there is generally no problem, the learner answers all of the questions correctly. If I then ask the same learner to "tell me about HND" - disaster! They are unable to fit all of their bits of knowledge together and form it into a cohesive discourse on the subject.

Now I am sure this is due to to the way we learn things. In today's hectic world we tend to learn in soundbites - small discrete chunks of knowledge, but we don't take the time to reflect on that new knowledge and "sort it out" in orr minds. The result is that they stay as discrete chunks of knowledge rather tyan coalescing into knowledge about, and so mastery of a subject.
Can we change this sorry state of affairs?

Of course we can - but it's going to take some effort. Learners need more time to digest what they have learned and more opportunities to manipulate that knowledge to learn how to use and apply the knowledge. that means more of us senior members of staff discussing things with those that are learning - exploring a subject rather than just testing the knowledge of facts.

Windy's Advice

Here's some suggestions from me:

1. Talk with your learners - don't be judgemental otherwise they will just clam up - the idea is to get them to discuss their ideas on a subject rather than them trying to say what (thay think) you want to hear.
2. Set some open-ended questions for them to do - don't just comment on their "fact retrieval" but comment on their writing style. One of the best and hardest tasks I set my learners is to select a target audience for their their answers - members of the public, consultant haematologists, patients, nurses and other scientists - these are really difficult (but enjoyable to do) and can utterly transform the answers to the same question.
3. Get learners to discuss topics with their peers - this is great "low-risk" feedback as a group will probably know more about any subject than one expert - this way they can make mistakes without losing kudos in the eyes of the expert. Make sure you are on hand to answer any queries the group may have though.

There you go - that's my two penneth on one of my major hobbyhorses.