Two kinds of memory or knowledge

People talk about two kinds of learning or even two kinds of knowledge:

1. Conceptual knowledge: understanding definitions, concepts, rules, or principles
2. Procedural knowledge: being able to perform activities such as solving a math equation, applying the right grammar rule in the correct context

You can acquire conceptual knowledge by reading, listening to lectures and then thinking about it or even better discussing it with colleagues. With simple enough concepts, you can even learn something conceptually in a few minutes.

But procedural knowledge can only be acquired through practice and over time. It is relatively easy to learn a list of words and a few rules for using them. But when you try to actually say a sentence in a real context, that kind of knowledge seems completely out of reach. Your working memory simply is not big enough to retrieve the words, put endings on them and put them in the right order while also thinking about what you want to say or worrying about what the other person thinks of your accent.

The biggest mistake people make is to assume that just because they understand some concept, they can use it in actual performance. In general, people almost always practice too little and learn the rules too much. They value understanding over the ability to do something with that understanding.

And things get even worse. That is because conceptual knowledge actually relies on procedural knowledge. As the concepts get more complicated, it becomes more difficult to just keep all aspects of the ideas in your head. We learn concepts to do something with them. But if we can’t hold enough of the concept in our working memory at the same time as another one, even a simple thing like comparison is out of reach.

So it is worthwhile to insert little moments of practice even into conceptual learning. Particularly when encountering one of these:

• Abstract concepts
• Acronyms
• Terms, foreign words, names
• Equations
• Variables
• Functions

2. Is developed through engagement with content such as guides, lessons, etc. | 1. Developing fluency of performance in the area of competence
3. Relies on ability to perceive and act based on the perception
4. Is developed through a feedback loop of repetition and reflection |

Two kinds of retrieval: “Look and know” vs “Look up and know”

When we talk about conceptual or procedural knowledge, we always think of it as something that is stored somewhere in your brain or in our muscles (or a combination of both). But the actual question that is of interest to us here is how we retrieve those pieces of knowledge from this storage into working memory.