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 FAQs
Why can a student pass an exam and still be unable to use what was learned?
The knowledge was encoded to one situation, so it is recalled only in highly similar ones; this is called inert knowledge.
This is the problem of inert knowledge, which is information a person can express but cannot use. One example given is foreign language vocabulary that is available during an exam but not in a real situation of communication. One explanation is that people often encode knowledge to a specific situation, so that later remindings occur only for highly similar situations. In contrast, conditionalized knowledge also includes knowledge of the contexts in which that knowledge will be useful. Alfred North Whitehead first described the phenomenon in 1929 and called the problem of keeping knowledge from becoming inert the central problem of all education.
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
Lead paragraph
Inert knowledge is information which one can express but not use.
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