Better than their thinking they don’t need to accept correction at all, but then, if you don’t teach them measures for determining whether “corrections” are actually correct, they’re liable to get their heads filled up with garbage.
And teaching the stupid students to learn to accept correction gracefully from smart students is a lot less good and useful than teaching all the students to accept correction gracefully from their peers whenever they’re mistaken and receive it.
Well of course, if after hearing an explanation they realize they were wrong and why, then they should accept that correction no matter where it came from. And they should be open to listening to such proposed corrections from all sources.
But often even after the error is pointed out and explained, they still don’t understand why they were wrong. The one correcting them needs to know more than the minimum to be able to teach others, and needs to invest the time to explain it. There’s a long way from “remember correctly the right answer” to “be able to explain why this answer is the right one”. Most children are not able to understand why what they are taught is right, and even if they are, they are rarely taught these reasons.
So if children know some other, smarter children are pretty reliably right, then they should definitely use a heuristic of deferring to them whenever they disagree about the study subject matter. This is easy to calibrate empirically based on previous experience, even for children—people are good at tracking who tends to be right.
I don’t think students tend to be particularly shortchanged with respect to that sort of lesson by the current system though. Most students are aware of who the top students are, and that the top students are more reliable in their areas of expertise than the lesser ones.
Should they defer to the top students in matters outside of what they know to be those students’ areas of expertise? Not necessarily; a lot of smart people are not particularly good at getting right answers outside their areas of expertise. For a not-so-smart person, simply trusting that a smarter person knows what they’re talking about on any given subject, even when they don’t know that person to be an expert on the subject, is not a very trustworthy heuristic.
Trusting people who’re more expert than you in a particular field over your own judgment in that field is something that most students already learn. Being unable to assess who’s more expert in domains in which they’re not well trained is natural and probably unavoidable, and students can’t be trained to be expert in everything.
Better than their thinking they don’t need to accept correction at all, but then, if you don’t teach them measures for determining whether “corrections” are actually correct, they’re liable to get their heads filled up with garbage.
And teaching the stupid students to learn to accept correction gracefully from smart students is a lot less good and useful than teaching all the students to accept correction gracefully from their peers whenever they’re mistaken and receive it.
Well of course, if after hearing an explanation they realize they were wrong and why, then they should accept that correction no matter where it came from. And they should be open to listening to such proposed corrections from all sources.
But often even after the error is pointed out and explained, they still don’t understand why they were wrong. The one correcting them needs to know more than the minimum to be able to teach others, and needs to invest the time to explain it. There’s a long way from “remember correctly the right answer” to “be able to explain why this answer is the right one”. Most children are not able to understand why what they are taught is right, and even if they are, they are rarely taught these reasons.
So if children know some other, smarter children are pretty reliably right, then they should definitely use a heuristic of deferring to them whenever they disagree about the study subject matter. This is easy to calibrate empirically based on previous experience, even for children—people are good at tracking who tends to be right.
I don’t think students tend to be particularly shortchanged with respect to that sort of lesson by the current system though. Most students are aware of who the top students are, and that the top students are more reliable in their areas of expertise than the lesser ones.
Should they defer to the top students in matters outside of what they know to be those students’ areas of expertise? Not necessarily; a lot of smart people are not particularly good at getting right answers outside their areas of expertise. For a not-so-smart person, simply trusting that a smarter person knows what they’re talking about on any given subject, even when they don’t know that person to be an expert on the subject, is not a very trustworthy heuristic.
Trusting people who’re more expert than you in a particular field over your own judgment in that field is something that most students already learn. Being unable to assess who’s more expert in domains in which they’re not well trained is natural and probably unavoidable, and students can’t be trained to be expert in everything.