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> First-tier med school grad students with no idea how big cells are. First-tier astronomy grad students getting the color of the Sun wrong I fail to get outra

> First-tier med school grad students with no idea how big cells are. First-tier astronomy grad students getting the color of the Sun wrong I fail to get outraged about this. Surely the important skill is knowing when you don't know, recognising when you need to know, and knowing where to look up the relevant facts. (Disclaimer - these aren't my subjects though I do have a fair bit of physics)

mncharity 7y ago
> Surely the important skill is knowing when you don't know, recognising when you need to know The astronomy students who get it wrong are generally initially quite confident. At least some of the med students both knew they didn't know, and rejected the correct size. So we're not doing great even on such recognition. > how big cells are Attempting to teach a sense of scale is part of most every undergraduate science and engineering program. So some first-tier medical school students lacking in such, at least raises the question of how well that teaching is working, even among more successful students. > knowing where to look up the relevant facts Beyond recall of individual facts, is integrating them into understanding. One challenge when teaching stoichiometry, is apparently students not thinking of atoms as real physical objects. It's not that they are missing a fact, that atoms don't locally pop in and out of existence in large numbers, but that they've failed to make a connection, that after some chemistry happens, those atoms must still be around. Having a misconception about the color of the Sun might lose you a game of trivial pursuit. But it will also interfere with your understanding of say blackbodies and color. And by hindering integration, make it less likely that you'll catch your misconceptions with those too. Recurse. Lacking a sense of scale, means missing a powerful framework for integrating physical phenomena, and not having a feel for reasonable numbers, and thus struggling with rough quantitative reasoning. > outraged Ok... but awareness of the magnitude of current problems, and of available opportunities for improvement, is nice to have, no?

mncharity 7y ago

> Surely the important skill is knowing when you don't know, recognising when you need to know The astronomy students who get it wrong are generally initially quite confident. At least some of the med students both knew they didn't know, and rejected the correct size. So we're not doing great even on such recognition. > how big cells are Attempting to teach a sense of scale is part of most every undergraduate science and engineering program. So some first-tier medical school students lacking in such, at least raises the question of how well that teaching is working, even among more successful students. > knowing where to look up the relevant facts Beyond recall of individual facts, is integrating them into understanding. One challenge when teaching stoichiometry, is apparently students not thinking of atoms as real physical objects. It's not that they are missing a fact, that atoms don't locally pop in and out of existence in large numbers, but that they've failed to make a connection, that after some chemistry happens, those atoms must still be around. Having a misconception about the color of the Sun might lose you a game of trivial pursuit. But it will also interfere with your understanding of say blackbodies and color. And by hindering integration, make it less likely that you'll catch your misconceptions with those too. Recurse. Lacking a sense of scale, means missing a powerful framework for integrating physical phenomena, and not having a feel for reasonable numbers, and thus struggling with rough quantitative reasoning. > outraged Ok... but awareness of the magnitude of current problems, and of available opportunities for improvement, is nice to have, no?