James Flynn: Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents' Research | Columbia News. Stuart Firestein, a professor and chair of the biological sciences department, is a connoisseur of ignorance. He teaches a popular course by that name to graduating seniors, and it is the title of his recently published book, Ignorance: How it Drives Science (Oxford University Press). Firestein chose that title for his course, which he started teaching in 2006, to be provocative, figuring it would grab the attention of undergraduates paging through the College’s course guide. But he wasn’t being facetious. “I’m not talking about stupidity or callow indifference to facts,” he said. “It comes out of this notion that the one mistake that we make in teaching science—especially to undergraduates—is that we just teach them a lot of facts, and that if you memorize them you’ll be fine.”
That’s not what science is about, he said. The benefits of ignorance in higher learning have an exalted provenance. Firestein came to science via a most unconventional route. Or the limits of facts. Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance. Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work. Three Principles to Developing Yourself as a Leader by William Cohen, Ph.D. Nilofer Merchant: Got a meeting? Take a walk. Kelly McGonigal: How to make stress your friend. Making Critical Thinking Intuitive. Teaching For Intuitive Understanding The meaning of “intuitive” we are using in this chapter makes no reference to a mysterious power of the mind, but rather to the phenomenon of “quick and ready insight” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary).
This sense of the word is connected to the everyday fact that we can learn concepts at various levels of depth. When, for example, we memorize an abstract definition of a word and do not learn how to apply it effectively in a wide variety of situations, we end up without an intuitive foundation for our understanding. We lack the insight, in other words, into how, when, and why it applies. Helping students to develop critical thinking intuitions is, then, helping them gain the practical insights necessary for a quick and ready application of concepts to cases in a large array of circumstances. Unfortunately much of what we originally learned in school as children was abstract and unconnected to everyday life and experience.