This link has been bookmarked by 8 people . It was first bookmarked on 21 Aug 2008, by Wisely.
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14 Nov 09
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07 Nov 09
Sue Frantz"Very often, students will think they understand a body of material. Believing that they know it, they stop trying to learn more. But, come test time, it turns out they really don’t know the material. Can cognitive science tell us anything about why students are commonly mistaken about what they know and don’t know? Are there any strategies teachers can use to help students better estimate what they know?"
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29 Oct 09
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24 Sep 08
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21 Aug 08
Wisely"Our Mind Is Fooled When We Know Part of the Material or Related Material"
brain misunderstanding inference hastiness familiarity discuss
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“Familiarity” Fools Our Mind into Thinking We Know More than We Do
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Familiarity is the knowledge of having seen or otherwise experienced some stimulus before, but having little information associated with it in your memory. Recollection, on the other hand, is characterized by richer associations. For example, a young student might be familiar with George Washington (he knows he was a President and maybe that there’s a holiday named after him), whereas an older student could probably recollect a substantial narrative about him.
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Although familiarity and recollection are different, an insidious effect of familiarity is that it can give you the feeling that you know something when you really don’t. For example, it has been shown that if some key words of a question are familiar, you are more likely to think that you know the answer to the question
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Our Mind Is Fooled When We Know Part of the Material or Related Material
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The results showed that whether or not they could actually recognize the right answer, people gave higher feeling-of-knowing judgments to questions using many-example categories (e.g., “Who composed the music for the ballet Swan Lake?”) than to questions using few-example categories (e.g., “Who choreographed the ballet Swan Lake?”). The experimenters argued that when people see the composer question, the answer doesn’t come to mind, but the names of several composers do. This related information leads to a feeling of knowing. Informally, we could say that subjects conclude (consciously or unconsciously), “I can’t retrieve the Swan Lake composer right now, but I certainly seem to know a lot about composers. With a little more time, the answer to the question could probably be found.” On the other hand, the choreographer question brings little information to mind and, therefore, no feeling of knowing.
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How Students End Up with “Familiarity” and “Partial Access” to Material
If a student believes that he knows material, he will likely divert attention elsewhere; he will stop listening, reading, working, or participating. -
1. Rereading. To prepare for an examination, a student rereads her classnotes and textbook. Along the way, she encounters familiar terms (“familiar” as in she knows she’s heard these terms before), and indeed they become even more familiar to her as she rereads. She thinks, “Yes, I’ve seen this, I know this, I understand this.” But feeling that you understand material as it is presented to you is not the same as being able to recount it yourself.
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2. Shallow Processing. A teacher may prepare an excellent lesson containing a good deal of deep meaning. But this deep meaning will only reside in a student’s memory if the student has actively thought about that deep meaning (see “Students Remember...What They Think About,” American Educator, Summer 2003, www.aft.org/american_educator/summer2003/cogsci.html).
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3. Recollecting Related Information. Sometimes students know a lot of information related to the target topic, and that makes them feel as though they know the target information.
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