The impact of conceptual versus memorization-based teaching methods on student performance

Recently, the primary focus of high schools has shifted towards success on standardized testing in reading and math, resulting in less time for optional subjects like economics. This leads to ‘curriculum narrowing,’ where students are only taught test-relevant knowledge. With greater focus on memorizing assessed knowledge, students’ understanding may be limited by the lack of conceptual learning. This is exemplified in the case of business-economics, where concepts like marginals stem from calculus — explaining these relationships can help students apply their knowledge more broadly. Without these links, students may miss deeper relationships between subjects, limiting their ability to utilize their knowledge outside of test-based contexts. We aimed to investigate whether students would perform better if key conceptual mathematical elements were connected to give a deeper understanding of the subject. We hypothesized that students would perform better on testing if they were taught business-economic models conceptually, compared to students taught the models through memorization. During the study, we taught two groups of students over a two-week period. One group focused on memorization-based learning, while the other focused on a more conceptual understanding of the subject, which included deeper mathematical explanations. While neither group showed significantly better performance, the concept-based group’s scores tended to be closer to the average, suggesting an advantage in consistency of student performance. The increased consistency may suggest students of all levels attained a deeper understanding of the content, benefiting long-term retention. Further research should assess long-term effects of these methods and account for students’ prior mathematical abilities.