How to Decide What is Need to Know and What is Nice to Know for your Learners
By: Joel Macdonald
Tags: Pedagogy, Planning, Instructional Design, Teaching And Learning

How to Decide What is Need to Know and What is Nice to Know for your Learners Joel MacDonald Follow Apr 23, 2020 · 4 min read

Last time out, I wrote about how people learn and some practical tips that can be gleaned from the processes of memory — those being attention, encoding, storage and retrieval. Well, encoding, storage and retrieval are documented processes of memory. Attention usually gets lumped in with encoding. However, as an instructional designer, I feel it deserves to be it’s own separate process worthy of its own specific tips for teachers. And so that’s what I did!

Something else worth noting is that time is a key factor in learning. The process of retrieval means basically practicing retrieving what you know (or think you know). If you are going to do that, then it also stands to reason that you aren’t going to be trying to put a whole bunch of new facts and information into your brain at the same time you’re trying to remember facts and information you covered just recently. Working memory, as we know, is limited in how much information it can take in and process. It’s going to be very difficult to move new information through working memory into long-term memory at the same time we’re trying to move content from long-term memory back into working memory.

So, learning takes time.

And if you are teaching something where there is a lot of content to cover, then how could you expect that learners will actually be able to remember or know all of it by the time all is said and done? In fact, there may be too much content to cover and not enough time to cover it all in.

There needs to be time dedicated to putting information in but then there also needs to be ample time dedicated to getting that information back out again.

I’ll talk with clients a great deal about them figuring out the ‘need to know’ versus the ‘nice to know’ of their content. Albeit, for any subject matter expert or specialist in a field, every piece of content is going to seem awesome and worthy of the status ‘need to know.’ However, we really need to think about our learners in order to help us decide what to cover because that is what they really need to know. Are the learners novice or more experienced? Is the content they’re receiving required for what they are to do or is it more elective in nature?

Still, deciding what limited information makes the need to know list can be difficult. My first tip then is that what sits in the need to know category are things that you, as a teacher, are going to test your learners on. In fact, that content will feature in high-stakes, summative assessment. If the information doesn’t appear in your testing of your learners, then is it really need to know? A second tip I’ll suggest is finding ways to compare the information you want to present against a series of categories or standards.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a pretty common way of categorizing knowledge that anyone involved in instruction has probably at least heard of before. However, it’s really only good at determining how to assess or test the knowledge. The assumption with Bloom’s Taxonomy is that we’re going to be assessing learner knowledge and we use the various categories to determine the level of cognitive effort we want to put on learners to demonstrate what they know. After all, some things we’re going to need to have on the tip of our tongues/brains while other things can be at the tip of our fingers (via an internet search, for example).

So what we need instead is a system that helps us decide to what level we want our learners to pay attention to the information we’re presenting. We know that what gets paid attention to gets thought about and what gets thought about gets remembered. Enter Dr. Maria Anderson’s ESIL Lens. ESIL stands for existence, supported, independent and lifetime.

Dr. Maria Anderson’s ESIL Lens with the blogger’s idea of need to know vs nice to know added

This is one way you can present all your content while making it clear to yourself and to your learners what is nice to know and what is need to know. And you can combine the Independent and Lifetime levels of the ESIL Lens with Bloom’s Taxonomy to get more specific with your assessment and further stratify your course plan in the process.

If you’re interested in learning more about Anderson’s ESIL Lens, you can hear her speaking about it in this podcast.