I've addressed in the past a particular dichotomy: teaching (the responsibility of the teacher) and learning (the responsibility of the student.) I want to address here another dichotomy: What is happening in the student's brain versus what is happening in the student's mind.
Thanks to the work of modern neuroscience, what is happening in a human brain is better understood now more than ever. But of course, what we once could easily understand or picture (say, literally, "pouring information or knowledge into a brain") is now replaced with an accumulation of small, neurochemical details gleaned from many studies and investigations. These small details can be stitched together into a coherent picture, and this is work that is current, ongoing, and available.
What is happening in a student's mind is harder to pin down. But what is a mind? How does it work versus how a brain works? Is there really such a thing as a mind? Is learning a product of the mind or of the brain?
These are all good questions, for which I certainly don't have answers. What I can say is that you cannot somehow examine a student's brain to determine what the student thinks. Even the student doesn't necessarily know what he thinks. Plenty of times I think I know something only to discover I really don't. And other times I have come to realize, to my surprise, that I somehow do know something.
Perhaps, more to the point, we could simply ask a student, "What are you thinking right now?" I frequently find myself on the verge of telling a student some piece of information - I am the teacher, the subject expert, after all! But instead I catch myself and try to ask a question instead, especially if it's more important that I have a better idea of what the student is thinking. And why would I want to know what a student is thinking? Because it would, I hope, help me understand what she has learned. Her answer could lead to more questions from me, as I attempt to fully understand what she knows.
Have you ever been subject to an oral exam, i.e. viva voce? When I was an undergrad, I participated in an observational astronomy program with a small number of fellow students. The program was off-campus since it required being near an observatory. At the end of the semester, the professor decided that an oral exam would be an appropriate final exam for each of us in our small group.
The way an exam viva voce works is that a question is asked, and your answer determines what the next question will be. The professor pokes and probes in this way to find out what you know and, more importantly, what you don't know. When it appears that what you know or can figure out has been exhausted, the professor moves on to another question. From the student's point of view, each series of questions ends in failure. It's exhausting, and when you're done you feel like you've failed every question. Of course none of us failed, we all just reached the limits of what we knew and understood. The professor, being the expert, had a much more realistic idea of what we knew, what we should have known, and where we could go next.
What has a student learned? And learned as opposed to what a student has memorized, or looked up (or asked AI). Do the examinations we give students really probe their thinking and give us an idea of what students know?
In the school where I taught this past year, it seemed that all the students had already figured out AI. One student, who I suspected had used AI surreptitiously during a quiz, was upset that I was calling him on it. "But you want us to give you the right answers, right?"
