[IAEP] How can we help kids get into the habits of looking for all possible causes and counter examples to problems?

[Maria Droujkova]

On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 5:11 AM, Steve Thomas <sthomas1 at gosargon.com> wrote:

> Early in the Alan's talk<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-124161889929978086>(~34:30, sound terrible, content good) Alan talks about a survey done at the
> Harvard commencement ceremonies where students, teachers and faculty were
> asked:
>
>    1. Why are there seasons?
>    2. What causes the phases of the moon?
>
> Most got it wrong (usually along the lines of "the seasons are caused by
> the distance from the earth to the Sun").
> Alan tried this at UCLA and got the same results (about 95% got had severe
> misconceptions about one or both of them).
> He then asked the follow up to question #1; When its Summer in the Northern
> hemisphere, what season is it in the Southern Hemisphere?  They all got that
> right, then after about 20 seconds the contradiction hit them
>
> Then he asks, why is it, that they didn't come up with
> this contradiction when they were asked the first question?
>
> So what can we do about this, and how can we help kids look for all
> possible causes and find counter examples?
>

Maybe we should stage less idle talk, and invite kids to spend longer,
in-depth time doing something. As the example above illustrates, if you
spend even a few minutes with a problem, a lot of misconceptions go away. In
my experience, when people need to DO something using a piece of knowledge,
their understanding becomes robust.

Looking back at my life, I have never had to do anything with REASONS for
seasons or phases of the moon, outside of curriculum design. Have you?

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
919-388-1721

Make math your own, to make your own math
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