Teaching Facts, Skills, Concepts, and Morals: What’s the Difference?
Kip Téllez
UCSC ED 180

Teaching Facts
Teachers help students learn facts—that is, verifiable pieces of specific information. Facts take a variety of forms, including definitions, names, dates, and formulae. For instance, learning the names of the state capitols is factual learning. While crucial to overall knowledge development, facts do not generalize well. They are specific to the context in which they are taught. Methods for teaching facts vary considerably. Teachers may suggest students use flashcards, instructional technology, games or other devices for remembering facts.

Sample question used when teaching facts: “What is this?”

Teaching Skills
Teachers also want students to learn skills. Skills are best considered a type of learning that gets better with practice. The most obvious examples come from motor learning. Practicing your tennis serve will likely make you more accurate (a good coach can help, too!). But skills learning can also include cognitive skills, such as using a dictionary. For instance, if you practice finding words in dictionary by learning how to use the guide words or recognizing the significance of different typefaces, you will very likely become faster and more efficient. Methods for teaching skills usually involve practice in which the teacher gives quick feedback on the student's performance.

Sample feedback used when teaching skills: “That time was better. Can you tell what you did differently?”

Teaching Concepts
Teachers are generally most concerned with conceptual learning because it helps learners to understand why. Concepts are distinguished from facts in that they are a much broader, deeper type of knowledge. Learning a concept should help the learner generalize from the teaching context to other, different contexts. In this way, conceptual learning is like a key: it helps to open learning in other areas. Concepts are also different from facts and skills because they involve relationships or processes. Photosynthesis, natural selection, and the theory of relativity are all examples of large, organizing concepts. Learning concepts is usually much more difficult than learning facts because it requires analytical thinking; facts taught within a concept are typically learned faster. Teaching for concepts can take many forms. One common method for conceptual development is the use of examples and non-examples, with a focus on attributes/criteria for inclusion. Teachers also engage in hypothetical questioning and systems analysis instruction for teaching concepts.

Sample question used when teaching concepts: “What do you notice about…?” or “How is x like y?”

"Teaching” Morals
Teaching is placed in quotation marks above because we don’t typically consider morality as something that can be taught. Children and youth learn morals best when they see examples of virtue. Exhortation is much less effective. Moral knowledge, in contrast to other types of learning, cannot be forgotten. That is, once children understand it is wrong to steal, they don’t “forget” what they learned.

Questioning (e.g., “How would you feel if so-and-so did that to you?”) in the development of moral learning may have less value than modeling.