Is this an actual thing?
These examples were selected for drama. But the failure modes they illustrate seem widespread. A failure to develop a sense of scale, and a rough quantitative feel for reasonable values in one's field. And a failure to integrate knowledge, with misconceptions persisting far beyond introductory courses. The software one-liner is "if it isn't tested, it doesn't work". And current testing... has poor coverage over the set of skills one might hope for all students. On the one hand, these failures have been remarked upon for decades. On the other hand, as concept inventories spread across fields, a common pattern is "I'm sorry to waste your time taking something so basic as this new concept inventory" followed by "oh bleep, I had no idea". Which is perhaps a metaphor for the bigger picture. It seems we sort of know it's a disaster, but that hasn't quite sunk in yet. Or something. The instructor of a bio lab course saying the thing they most wish their incoming students had, was a firmer grasp of central dogma... and this in a second (or third?) year course, mostly bio and pre-med majors, at a first-tier department and university. When they've likely seen it, repeatedly, since primary school. And yet how many pre-college biology educators view themselves being profoundly unsuccessful?
In my AP English class of all the smarty pants kids with all the advantages, I was the only one who knew what husbandry was. Everyone else thought it was about being married.
As an adult, on an email list full of people who attended Ivy league schools and the like, everyone was all up in arms about prejudice against homeschooling. There was an article about a court case where a judge blamed the stupid behavior of a young defendant on "home training" or "home schooling."
The defendant had not been homeschooled, but the people discussing the case were talking about the judge being wildly prejudiced against homeschooling. I had to point out that the judge was basically saying "Oh my God, son, you were just not raised right and you have zero so-called common sense." It had nothing to do with prejudice against homeschoolers.
I was profoundly impressed by the grace, respect, insight, and "achieving a meeting-of-the-minds response" that she repeatedly achieved. I'd not have thought it possible before seeing it. I wish I had noted her name, or had video.
It's still not something I can do, or even quite imagine how to do. But it changed how I feel when encountering people being aggressively confused. More "I wish I had more of her skill set", less "this seems simply hopeless".
And it can be startling how rapidly understanding can become gappy and ramshackle, as you move away from someone's narrow research focus or center of exceptional expertise. There's a recurring news meme, look at the <supposedly smart people> (eg, Harvard Business School students) not knowing the <basic thing> (eg, what causes seasons). But if the last time someone saw a topic was in middle school, why would a middle schooler's understanding of the topic come as a surprise? The "You're a Doctor? Yes, of medieval French literature. Great, I have a question for you. I have this nagging pain in my..." misunderstanding of expertise and competence.
The Ten Thousand[1] idea seems yet another significant contribution to society by xkcd. :) [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/
Imaging seeing an museum exhibit on elephants. Full of amazingly colorful elephants. Thermal IR elephants with glowing red ears and cold blue mud. UV elephants. Narrrow-band elephants, colored by the band color, or by something arbitrary. Synthetic elephants with psychedelic maps of skin microbiome. And so on. And not a single photo of a gray elephant in the room. Not a one.
How odd would that be?
Most of us have a chance to see the Sun hundreds of times a year. It just takes some conscious though to determine the color of it, compensate for the.effects of the atmosphere, etc. Sun from space should look more blue than from surface, even at a tropical noon.
Why not? Did they thing the actual answer was smaller or larger?
> And of the few students who get it right, about half (but small N) learned it in a seminar on common misconceptions in astronomy education, rather than from their own atypically successful and extensive education in astronomy.
Is the answer not yellowish-white?
The question then is "when you said colour what did you mean?". If you want the colour as viewed by a person, but from space without Earth's atmosphere, then that's a very specific request.
If someone says "yellow", you should ask, "why?" (as I did to one of my kids very recently). If they mention Rayleigh scattering then I'd say they answered an ill-defined question quite well.
If you think about it "the sun is white" is one of those weird physicisty things we do when we mean in an idealised situation that's not normally true. Like saying water is a liquid at RTP and not accounting for evaporation.
TL;DR "the sun is white" is incorrect perceptually. Physically -- not bound by human perception -- it's not just white as there is infrared and x-ray radiation too.
My own atypical view, is that they are extremely toxic mutagenic agents of corrupting cognitive death. ;) In part because the corruption spreads. Have one bogus bit of story, try to reconcile it with valid bits, and soon one has a creative flurry of additional bogus stories attempting to patch them together. Recurse.
I once saw an introduction to the solar system page, with a big graphic at the top. It was a work of art. It reinforced so many common misconceptions about the solar system. My thought then was, there's no way the rest of this page can dig out from the hole of damage done by this first graphic. Net-negative learning. In general, it seems so very easy for content to cause severe collateral damage.
I use a remark like "from space" or "outside the atmosphere", to prune a conversation space. But it does reinforce the idea, to the best of my knowledge incorrect, that seen from the surface, the Sun is not often white. Sorry. I'll have to think about how to mitigate that. Thanks.
This was the method used to teach me in school. Maybe it worked well but I recall at two stages having conversations like (me) "that's not true" and (teacher) "this is how we have to learn it for now".
Perhaps it would sit better with me if it was explicitly acknowledged that the model was flawed. "We're going to learn about how a ball flies, and bounces; but that's a surprisingly complex thing to make a physics picture of. So, we'll be simplifying it a lot just so we can kick-start our understanding by focussing on some basic concepts that are mathematically easier to model."
Imagine a conversation with a five-year old. "What are you doing? Making this Arduino blink an LED light. What color is the light?"... Now imagine responding to that five-year old with a discourse on spectra and photons.
Yes, the misconceptions in such discourse can be fun and amazing. A recurring response from non-astronomy physical-sciences graduate students is something like "The Sun doesn't have a color; it's lots of different colors; it's rainbow colored". But maybe I've long missed the interesting question.
Why is stuff like this even a candidate to be said? Does the Sun seem so alien or aphysical that normal experience of objects doesn't apply? Are concepts of color fragilely situational? ("Bananas are yellow, but wow, mangoes? Do mangoes even have a color? Photons mumble spectra mumble."?) Are answers just associational mind dumps? (Before the "five-year old" was emphasized, a recurring response was a brain dump of random ideas about color and about the Sun, followed by "Did I get it right?".) Just what is going on here?
There's seems an opportunity to think less superficially about this than I have done. Yay. Thanks!
It's mind blowing to me.
:) When people watch this[1], and I'm standing next to them, they'll often ask about the ripples. But if they were watching it alone, there isn't an easy way to do that.
Someone did an art project, where you sit and watch an interesting drama video. But why was it interesting? There's an eye tracker, and the video is a graph of scenes, like an old "choose your own adventure" story. So if you're interested in character A... the video explores/emphasizes character A.
AR/VR is coming. With eye tracking (eventually... patents). So...
Imagine science education that's consistently mind blowing, rather than boring. What might that be like?
Though a cautionary note: there's apparently a problem of students, who have consistently had excellent teachers, clearly and motivationally presenting material, reaching college without the skills or inclination to themselves wrestle with a body of knowledge and distill understanding. Another opportunity for improvement. :)
[1] stop-motion animation with individual molecules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0
Wouldn’t that make it yellowish or greenish white?
Good question - I don't know. I didn't pursue it, but where it was obvious, smaller. Thinking back now, years later, my impression of one student, is that of a feeling of great smallness, contrasted with a concrete length, maybe yielding a "no, that doesn't feel small enough".
> Is the answer not yellowish-white?
What color is sunlight? ;)
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)
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?
Financial planning is suggested as another one.
But even with subjects "covered"... Chemistry education research describes pre-college chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent". 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 don't think we fully appreciate quite how pervasively we're doing poorly. Or the magnitude of potential improvement we're neglecting to pursue.
But AR is coming, providing yet another opportunity for disruption. Modulo patents. :/