Ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge?

http://eres.olin.wesleyan.edu/eres/docs/12989/dunnwhy.pdf

I really liked this link from Brent Swearingen (via Dick Ellis). Here’s an example from the longer piece on “competency theory.”

"The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people’s responses as superior to their own."

So perhaps this is why you often can’t explain to the “B” student what an “A” paper looks like or to a faculty member who gets low evaluations why others get so much higher evaluations. This isn’t to say that all “developmental efforts” (for students or for faculty) are useless (the paper makes the opposite case), but it does help explain why so many Honors students have “the imposter syndrome” and why so many poor students can’t understand why they’re not getting higher grades. There’s also an interesting point at the end about how to get more women into fields such as Science and Engineering.