It is more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than it is for them to learn facts.

Whether understanding ideas and concepts is more significant than learning facts for students is extremely controversial. Some might contend that students have to learn the fact so as not to be deceived and regard these facts as foundation, while others argue that students need to realize ideas and concepts in order to be able to think independently. In my opinion, I tend to agree with the argument. The reasons are stated as followed.

To begin with, it is very essential for students to be creative and learning ideas and concepts can help students come up with more creativity. For example, when I was high school students, my teacher taught me a lot of chemical and physics equations and many facts and knowledge of subjects; thus I can successfully apply these equations in my entrance exam. Eventually, I enrolled in top one university in Taiwan because of my perfect entrance exam scores. However, when I became a college student who worked as a research assistant and conducted a plenty of experiments and research plans, I found out that facts and knowledge are just basic and the most important part in research is concepts and ideas because if we can know ideas and concepts behind the subjects and research, we can make use of these ideas and concepts to new field of study and generate creative researches or approaches. So, I reviewed the subjects again and acquired a lot of ideas and concept about electricity. Consequently, I used these ideas and concepts and created high-quality and cutting-edge paper of study which later was posted on Nature. Therefore, I think that ideas and concepts is indispensable for student to be more creative.

For another reason, competitiveness is also crucial for students and looking into ideas and concepts can enable students to be more competitive. For instance, I applied a job in field of chemical engineering and got a chance to have interview with HR. In the interview, interviewer asks candidates about the fact in chemical engineering: Unit Operation Equations. So, some candidates just listed the equation on the board. Nevertheless, I can not only listed the equation but also explain the concepts and ideas in these equations such as limitation of temperature and state of liquids. As a result, I was the only one to be accepted by this company and got a wonderful job. Apparently, if students desire to be competitive, they have to figure out the ideas and concepts inside the facts like equations and knowledge.

To conclude, there is no doubt that students can benefit from understanding ideas and concepts; On the other hand, learning facts is just basic. In other words, due to creativity and competitiveness, it is much more important for students to comprehend the ideas and concepts than to learn fundamental facts.