What is procedural knowledge?

Updated: Jun 10

Here's a snippet from my longer blog post What Are All The Different Types Of Knowledge? (part 1):

Procedural - knowing how to

Procedural knowledge is mentioned in several of the Ofsted reviews, and can be directly linked to what most in education still think of as skills.

Computing: "Procedural knowledge is knowledge of methods or processes that can be performed. It can be described as ‘knowing how’."

PE: "Procedural knowledge can be viewed as the know-how to apply declarative facts... Anderson theorised that all procedural knowledge begins as declarative knowledge and therefore argues that before taking action, you must have acquired a degree of declarative knowledge. (JR Anderson, ‘How can the human mind occur in the physical universe?’ Oxford University Press, 2007)"

Music: "Procedural knowledge is the knowledge exercised in the performance of a task."

Geography: "technical knowledge and skills."

Maths: "Procedural knowledge is recalled as a sequence of steps. The category includes methods, algorithms and procedures: everything from long division, ways of setting out calculations in workbooks to the familiar step-by-step approaches to solving quadratic equations. All content in this category can be prefaced by the sentence stem ‘I know how’."

This is the kind of knowledge that is often confused with disciplinary knowledge, and for this reason I have added the word 'to' to my brief definition (above). This confusion comes about because it is possible, as we shall see below, that procedural knowledge can be either substantive or disciplinary.

Disciplinary knowledge is knowing how we know a piece of substantive knowledge, whereas procedural knowledge is knowing how to carry out a procedure (which is still referred to most often as a skill). It might be the case that children gain disciplinary knowledge of a procedure, and then develop procedural knowledge of that same set of actions; for example, they may learn about how a scientist discovered something (disciplinary conceptual knowledge - see below), then carry out the same actions themselves in order to conduct an investigation (disciplinary procedural knowledge - see https://www.aidansevers.com/post/what-are-all-the-different-types-of-knowledge-part-1).

Examples of procedural knowledge:

How to: