The More You Know the More You Learn

Vocabulary.com's blog has a post about a study that show that students with larger vocabularies learn new words faster. I suspect the same is true of all areas. The more math you know, the more quickly you can learn math, the more history you know, the more quickly you can learn history. One implication of this is that kids who fall behind in the early grades will have a harder and harder time as they progress through school. Ninth-grade history, for instance, will be much easier for the students who learned a lot of history in elementary school and middle school—both in class and through leisure reading, talking with parents, watching documentaries, and so on. Just as knowing more makes it easier to learn, knowing more also makes a subject more interesting and fun to learn more. I don't think it's a coincidence. It's just challenging to persuade a student who finds everything "boring" that it will probably get interesting if she puts in enough work to learn something.