The guest author is Professor of Education at the University of Texas at Arlington. It's good that educational research continues around the world. For the mome

The guest author is Professor of Education at the University of Texas at Arlington. It's good that educational research continues around the world. For the moment, it's especially important that education research focuses on what happens to young pupils in conventional classrooms, because they far outnumber older students who use MOOCs to learn. In that respect, I think the title "Khan Academy: The Illusion of Understanding" is unfair, because there are plenty of learners with illusions of understanding leaving the elementary schools of my country and yours, even though those learners have hands-on experiences in the classroom. Michael Shayer in Britain[1] has been doing great research for years about how early experiences of children shape their understanding of the world. He has discovered that many of Piaget's findings about how children proceed through developmental stages in understanding no longer replicate in current children, because children today have different kinds of early life experiences from children in Piaget's era. What happens as society changes over time is that some experiences that used to be commonplace become rare, and other experiences that used to be rare become the most influential experiences in children's development. The best way to gain intuition about Archimedes' principle (the example given in the blog post kindly submitted here) is probably to do the experiment repeatedly with differing experimental conditions and careful observation. The history of physics around the world shows that for centuries great thinkers could be badly confused about very elementary principles of physics. Galileo did the world a favor by insisting that physicists do more experiments to check their hypotheses. Teaching elementary pupils to hold their conclusions about the world tentatively and with an attitude of testing out everything they believe is the best kind of elementary teaching. Whether by video or in person, good teaching encourages learners to draw on their life experience between lesson sessions to test out ideas and to see what ideas are really correctly understood. [1] https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/michael-shayer(5c4f7363-ab67-4fe8-a3a7-3228d757fdbf).html https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/michael-shayer(5...