Throughout K-12, educators circle back to topics that may have been covered in earlier grades — but with more depth and at a higher, more exploratory level appropriate to students’ intellectual development. The familiar ring, however, can sometimes lead students to roll their eyes and insist they have already learned the material.
And that, some experts say, is because the students don’t know what they don’t know.
“You have to convince people that there are limits to their knowledge,” said Jerry Rosiek, education studies department head at University of Oregon's College of Education.
“Generally, it’s assumed that the best way to do that is to get students involved in an inquiry or some sort of a dialogue, where their own knowledge of the topic is revealed to be inadequate,” said Rosiek. “They’ve already done physics, but here’s a physics problem," and what they already know "doesn’t solve the problem.”
Students often confuse having some knowledge with having a full understanding, said Michelle Jordan, associate professor at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton College of Teaching and Learning Innovation.
“What makes you knowledgeable is being able to think about, not just having the right answers, but knowing what to do with them. What are the implications of them? How can they be applied?” she asked. “Knowledge is only as useful as what you can do with it.”
Therein lies the difference
The difference between someone who is good at trivia and someone who is truly knowledgeable is the adaptability and flexibility of their knowledge, said Jordan, whose research focuses on K-12 STEM education.
“The practice of science or engineering is always done at the edges of what’s known, what we understand, what we can do,” she said. “What’s fun is not knowing what, but knowing why.”
That uncertainty is a gift, Jordan said. It’s welcome in the learning process. It’s what you’re looking for. You always want to be at the edge of knowledge.”
Ying-Chih Chen, associate director of teacher preparation and professor of science education at ASU, said focusing on the “why” questions through a Socratic dialogue helps students to recognize the limits of what they already know.
“They find out they only know a little bit,” he said. “Tell me more about your approach? Even if the student knows something, they will figure out they don’t know all the answers.”
Rosiek recommends hands-on, inquiry-based lessons in which students are asked to apply their knowledge.
“It has to be designed for the purpose of revealing the limits of their knowledge,” he said. “Then, the students are likely, you hope, to come out of that experience with the understanding that they don’t have the knowledge. Then they’re open to hearing more.”
Chen counsels teachers to start with phenomena in students’ everyday lives, and then point out aspects they might not have thought about — like how the solar panels that they see on nearby buildings work to generate electricity.
“They can be curious about why this happens and how to explain it,” he said. “The teacher can build in a storyline.”
When students are overconfident
People are sometimes overconfident about what they know and undervalue uncertainty, so teachers also need to help students realize that uncertainty is often warranted and can be productive, Jordan said.
“When is the moment that I should be reducing my uncertainties and understanding whether my knowledge is correct?” she asked. “When is it the right moment to generate new uncertainties, to make sure that I’m not being overconfident, that I’m not missing important opportunities for learning, that I’m not missing nuances?”
But in challenging overconfidence, Rusiek advises educators not to demean or impugn the students or their viewpoints.
“Nobody likes to be exposed publicly as having been wrong about something,” he said. “You can respond in a more fulsomely human way to the child in front of you. They can feel whether the teacher is playing ‘gotcha,’ or being supportive of the effort in changing their view of something.”
Chen further advises that teachers not make the level of uncertainty involved too simple — or too complex. If it’s too simple, “students think it’s boring, and something I already know,” he said. “When it’s too hard, the teacher needs to step in and be a scaffold.”
“Don’t leave them swimming in uncertainty,” Jordan said. “And don’t act as if the only valuable thing is reducing the uncertainty to zero. … Use it to elicit new wonderings.”
