Re:Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking st...
by WildUtah on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @01:01AM
(#4072489)
I've seen trees where the largest single component of the mass comes from butterflies. They alit on the branches. Water for most trees' mass mostly comes up out of the ground, though.
On the larger point, testing learning is hard in principle in that you are usually testing theory. Practice is the basis of theory and much harder to test.
But even then, writing a good test to test theory is very hard. Most objective test questions on university tests are terrible and only slightly, if at all, more likely to reward the testee for knowing the theory.
Re:Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking st...
by halfnelson on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @04:19PM
(#4070609)
If anyone wants to know the answer to that question, Richard Feynman explains it wonderfully: (He starts talking about trees at 2:00, but his explanation of fire is equally elegant!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE
My first instinct was to say that a tree's mass comes from dead stars. Imagining how it got from those stars to the air that eventually becomes the tree would keep you busy for a while :D
One of the big problems of standardized testing and school in general the way we've been doing it is that you can inculcate a great deal of pseudo-knowledge, and you can probe for its existence through these targeted tests, but in many cases you fail at instilling true understanding and knowledge.
Math and science becomes rote memorization of formulas and terms and plug-and-chug. But this isn't learning.
A classic example of the problems involved here is to go ask a bunch of recent college graduates about where the mass of a tree comes from. Even if you only ask people who have studied photosynthesis, you'll still get an abysmally low percentage of correct answers, if any. The same goes for any question on any topic that's covered in college which requires actual understanding and thorough application of the alleged "knowledge" that the students have acquired.