Students come into a classroom with their own experiences and a cognitive structure based on those experiences. These preconceived structures are either valid, invalid or incomplete. Memorized facts or information that has not been connected with the learner's prior experiences will be quickly forgotten. The current American classroom, whether grade school or college level, tends to resemble a one-person show with a captive but often comatose audience. There is the idea that there is a fixed world of knowledge that the student must come to know.
Information is divided into parts and built into a whole concept.
Teachers serve as pipelines and seek to transfer their thoughts and meanings to the passive student. There is little room for student-initiated questions, independent thought or interaction between students. The role of the teacher is to organize information around conceptual clusters of problems, questions and discrepant situations in order to engage the student's interest. Teachers assist the students in developing new insights and connecting them with their previous learning. Ideas are presented holistically as broad concepts and then broken down into parts.