Today, most educational systems are designed to work from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Students learn facts and figures and tiny fractions of knowledge long before anyone really puts things into a larger context.
Macroscopic learners need context. ===> They need to know the "big why" before learning the little what. <=== It’s a scaffolding problem. Macroscopic learners need to see the whole X-Mas tree before they start to hang the ornaments. Without this scaffolding, without understanding why they’re learning what they’re learning—aka context—then little makes sense and nothing is retained.
Read more:
Via Dr. Susan Bainbridge, Carlos Marcelo, juandoming