When children come up with the right answer, is it because they actually understand / comprehend the reasons why their answer is right? Do the highest scoring students actually understand the concepts behind their success?

Frequently not, it turns out. When asked “could you light a bulb with a battery and one wire?”, even at some of our most esteemed STEM graduates, from MIT and Harvard revealed some surprising cognitive dissonance.

In this series of online documentaries,  (entitled Minds of our Own) researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics delve in to the thinking behind students answers.  This thinking is often erroneous,  with odd concepts constructed to make sense of learners’ experienced worlds. Such thinking is tenacious and learners are heavily invested in not adapting… and learning environments may not facilitate such adaption. This is true for even the highest scoring pupils… and highlights deficiencies in learning experiences.

This underscores the need for pupils to think about thinking,  and for learning experiences to expose these thought processes – whether it be through inquiry learning, dialogue, problem based learning or moderated peer instruction