Current Knowledge

A person has a significant level of current chemical knowledge gained from life experiences. That is the first of the design principles of this work, and it is not a polite assertion. Learning theory identifies what someone already knows as the most important factor in learning. Every concept page, every question, every observation a learner is asked to make, lands somewhere in that existing knowledge. Where it lands, and what it connects to, is what determines whether it becomes part of the learner or slides past.

Current knowledge (CK for short) is not a single number. It is a vector with four dimensions. Breadth is how much territory the learner's knowledge covers. Accuracy is how much of what they know is actually correct. Connectivity is how many of the concepts they hold are linked to one another. Organization is how those connections are arranged, whether in tidy hierarchies or in tangles. A learner can grow in any one of these dimensions without necessarily growing in the others, and growth in any one is a real gain.

Thinking of knowledge as a vector rather than a quantity changes what it means to teach. If CK were just a quantity, teaching would mean adding more of it. Because CK is a vector, teaching can mean several different things at once. Broadening what the learner has met. Correcting what the learner has wrong. Connecting pieces the learner already holds but has never seen as related. Reorganizing a messy structure into a cleaner one. Any of these is a legitimate direction of travel.

Q. Is current knowledge the same thing as what a learner can recite on a test? No. It is the whole of what the learner has actually absorbed about the world, much of which they cannot articulate and some of which they hold wrongly. A course that only addresses what the learner can recite is a course that only touches a small part of what is actually there. The learner, and the teacher, both need to take the whole of CK seriously, because that is what any new information has to attach to.