Inert knowledge is information a person can express but cannot use, a state in which a learner's understanding has not developed far enough for that knowledge to be applied to effective problem solving in realistic situations. The phenomenon was first described in 1929 by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who warned against theoretical ideas that go unapplied within a pupil's own curriculum and named keeping knowledge from becoming inert as the central problem of all education. A commonly cited example is foreign language vocabulary a student can produce during an exam but not in an actual conversation, a gap attributed to knowledge being encoded to a specific situation so that it is later recalled only in closely similar situations, in contrast to conditionalized knowledge, which includes knowledge of the contexts in which it will actually be useful.
Facts
Core ClaimInformation a learner can state but not use, because understanding has not reached the point where the knowledge can be applied to effective problem-solving in realistic situations; encoding knowledge to one specific situation is offered as the explanation for why later remindings occur only for highly similar situations. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Inert Knowledge
Wikimedia FoundationWikipedia, Inert knowledge, lead sentence
Inert knowledge is information which one can express but not use.
Wikipedia, Inert knowledge, Whitehead attribution
The phenomenon of inert knowledge was first described in 1929 by Alfred North Whitehead
View the Source Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.