Pitfalls of Metaphors: Does Warm Air Hold More Water?
Glenn Dolphin & Kim Kastens
Using "warm air holds more water" as his inspiration, guest blogger Glenn Dolphin explores how the way that the human brain processes metaphors can foster durable misconceptions that obscure more than ...

Educating for "Sapience"
Kim Kastens
George Mobus has proposed that an underlying reason for humanity's inability to seriously tackle complex, large-scale, long-lead-time problems like global climate change is a lack of "sapience" in ...

What precursor understandings underlie the ability to make meaning from data?
Kim Kastens
Author suggests that a cognitive precursor underlying the ability to interpret data is the realization that events [sometimes] leave traces in the world, and that by examining the traces one can [sometimes] make ...

"Some Students Will..."
Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Author asks herself and readers whether it is OK to write learning objectives that begin "Some students will...", acknowledging up front that the lesson has subtleties that not every student is going to ...

Turning Nature Into Categories
Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Humans have developed many clever instruments for making numerical measurements of various aspects of nature, such as air temperature or wind velocity. However, in some circumstances, we take these carefully ...

Questions we don't think to ask
Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Limbs that are ripped off a tree hold their leaves, even as the rest of the parent tree looses its leaves. Kim had never noticed or questioned this might be. When it was pointed out and explained on a recent walk, ...

Faculty Professional Development by means of Case Based Reasoning
Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
"Case Based Reasoning" is a form of learning in which a person draws from multiple experiences or instances of something, and extracts lessons learned from the similarities across the cases. CBR is common ...

But should we call them "lies"?
Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
A reader raises the question of whether intentional simplifications of science concepts by teachers or other adults should be called "lies." Kim considers the question, and concludes that the term is ...

"Telling Lies to Children"
Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Fantasy writer Terry Pratchett and colleagues have characterized much of education as "telling lies to children." This post looks at which kinds of lies (aka simplifications) are more or less unacceptable ...

Learning to Learn from Data
Kim Kastens
Author sketches out some major elements of a learning progression that would take kids from a middle school level of understanding of how to make meaning from Earth Science data to an upperclass college level. ...