Rain by Faroese poet and novelist Carl Jóhan Jensen
An approach to testing and teaching
'Consider the problems of acquiring new knowledge; two ideas are particularly important. The first is that existing knowledge and conceptual structures affect the way that new materials are perceived and learned; the second is that new experiences bring about changes in our knowledge and conceptual structures. These two processes are referred to as assimilation (analogous to the way in which the stomach digests food, whose later structure cannot be recognized as being similar to its earlier structure) and accommodation (analogous to the way that the pupil of the eye adjusts itself different light levels). Biological analogies make it easier to understand these concepts but leave unresolved the question of when one accommodates and when one assimilates. In general, one accommodates (i.e. changes one's conceptual structures) when fresh knowledge provides strong challenges to what is in mind; so dramatic counter-examples to currently held beliefs, or coherent patterns in the world, which cannot be explained by existing beliefs are both likely to bring about accommodation. Assimilation (interpreting new events in terms of old ideas) can be made to work when the number of counter-examples to predictions made from old beliefs are rather low. It follows, therefore, that if misconceptions are to be remedied (i.e. the mechanism of assimilation is overcome and the mechanism of accommodation stimulated) a representative sample of questions in the domain of interest is unlikely to have the desired effect because the number of cases which violate pupils' misconceptions and which therefore might cause accommodation, will be relatively small. To foster accommodation it is necessary to provide dramatic examples which violate current conceptions and to provide these examples in quantity. Examples which are most likely to be dramatic are those in which it is obvious to pupils that the results they are obtaining using particular misconceptions are at variance with what they 'know to be true' from everyday experience.' pp.46-47.
'Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skilfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them. (Paul, Fisher and Nosich,1993, p. 4).' pp.4-5.
"The atom of Niels Bohr, a miniature solar system, had become a embarrassingly false image. ... Bohr himself had set the tone. In accepting the Nobel Prize for his atomic model, he said it was time to give up the hope of explanation in terms of analogies with everyday experience. 'We are therefore obliged to be modest in our demands and content ourselves with concepts that are formal in the sense that they do not provide a visual picture of the sort one is accustomed to require. . . .' This progress had not been altogether free of tension. 'The more I reflect on the physical portion of Schrödinger's theory, the more disgusting I find it,' was Heisenberg's 1926 comment to Pauli. 'Just imagine the rotating electron who charge is distributed over the entire space with axes in 4 or 5 dimensions. What Schrödinger writes on the visualizability of his theory . . . I consider trash.' As much as physicists valued the conceptualizing skill they called intuition, as much as they spoke of a difference between physical understanding and formal understanding, they had nevertheless learned to mistrust any picture of subatomic reality that resembled everyday experience. No more baseballs, artillery shells, or planetoids for the quantum theorists; no more idle wheels or wavy lines. Feynman's father had asked him, in the story he told many times: 'I understand that when an atom makes a transition from one state to another, it emits a particle of light called a photon. . . . Is the photon in the atom ahead of time? . . . Well, where does it come from, then? How does it come out?' No one had a mental image for this, the radiation of light, the interaction of matter with the electromagnetic field: the defining event of quantum electrodynamics." p.242.
critical thinking intuition | physics Bohr's atomic model reflection |
Gleick, J., (1992) GENIUS - Richard Feynman and modern physics, London: Little Brown and Company, p.242.
INDIVIDUAL
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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
HUMANISTIC -------------------------------------- MECHANISTIC
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
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GROUP
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Images: Penguin.
Kafka - https://www.wob.com/en-gb/books/franz-kafka/metamorphosis/9780140015720
... Novice to Expert, or Poetry anyone?
coming to terms with loss - bereavement pain awareness insight understanding communication |  |
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"The ideal type, as a case of the heuristic, resembles what is now called a model. ... He [Nagel] makes model refer simply to the mental imagery with which we clothe our theoretical entities in order to have some pictorial grasp of them : ... essentially analogies, yet they do more than help us visualize; they help our thinking to unfold by taking it in new directions.
[Model] is taken to mean a system of concepts that is useful in mapping the variables in a field under investigation. It may be a corner of a field or the whole field of the subject: a model may be of bureaucracy, for instance, or of society in general. ... in scientific work we do not start out with an empty mind, nor even with isolated hypotheses. We start with a guess about the whole structure of our universe of discourse. The coherence that goes into this system of concepts, a coherence whereby each concept is defined by the relationship in which it stands to the others, is analogous to explanation but is not explanation in fact. For it is not an account of reality as it has been experienced" (p. 510).
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| Brian E. Hodges - c/o Brian's family. |
Born in Liverpool, NW England, UK.
Community Mental Health Nurse NHS, Part-time Lecturer,
Researcher Nursing & Technology Enhanced Learning
Registered Nurse - Mental Health & General
Community Psychiatric Nursing (Cert.) MMU
PG Cert. Ed.
BA(Joint Hons.) Computing and Philosophy - BIHE - Bolton
PG(Dip.) Collaboration on Psychosocial Education [COPE] Univ. Man.
MRES. e-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning, Lancaster Univ.
Live and work in NW England - seeking a global perspective.
The views expressed on W2tQ are entirely my own, unless stated otherwise.
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