Re: [Phys-L] concept mapping; was: wondering about stuff

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

> The overarching theme here concerns the two-step process of
>  a) putting ideas and facts into the brain, and
>  b) getting them out again.
Unfortunately this is the old conventional vew which is very incorrect.  The
brain already has a variety of connections so students come into class with
a variety of conceptions or primitives.  Education has to deal with these by
helping students make these ideas work in new contexts.  This is actually
rewiring the brain.  If you just put in facts and ideas, they do not
displace the already existing facts and ideas.  The existing ones are still
there, and they surface under pressure to cause the students to give
incorrect answers.  If the existing ideas are strong, they overwhelm the new
ideas and even make students think that the existing ideas were taught in
class.  See the YouTube video by Mazur where he shows that students remember
the opposite of an in class demo and give the opposite answer two weeks
later claiming that is what they saw in class.

Getting the info out is inextricably bound to how it goes in, and is not a
totally separate process.  Facts which are connected go in easily.  But
facts which conflict with existing conceptions seem to go in, but are
filtered and can often only come out if you trigger something related to
these facts such as the person who said them.  Since most concepts and facts
end up being connected to extraneous things such as the room or the person
who is teaching, they are not retrievable under other circumstances.  The
big trick is to get the ideas to go in related to other important ideas
rather than to surface features.

Concept maps can be helpful, but someone else's map is often useless.  You
have to make your own map, and someone else's map may appear to be stupid or
incomprehensible.  I have given a test which consisted of having the student
make a concept map in class individually, and then I graded it.  One can
easily see how the student connects the concepts and the grading is actually
fairly easy.

The brain is not a camera or recording device.  When you bring up a visual
picture you really only remember certain details, and then you fill in the
rest with plausible details.  And when you are taking in information it is
filtered by pre-existing conceptions or paradigms.  So education has to take
this into account, and not just dispense ideas and facts.  Part of the
extreme vitriolic politics is because most people do not understand that
memories are actually fairly foggy and filtered by conceptions.  There are
people with much sharper recall, but they tend to think that their memories
are perfect, so they can be easily taken in.  They may even be some of the
most dogmatic people.  Even people with photographic memories do not have
perfect recall for all time.  There is always a point at which details are
omitted. Cognitive research has shown that attention is an active thing.
When you are not focusing on one part of a scene, the rest is usually filled
in by details that you know are there.  That is one reason why the students
play ball with the gorilla walking through works.  When you watch the balls,
you don't see the gorilla that doesn't belong there.  There are also
pictures which change with a brief blackout between, and you can't see the
change.  Whole mountains can disappear or be inserted and you can't see
this.  But once you figure out what has changed, then it is obvious.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX