Asking the right questions and estimating the quality of own understanding are nontrivial skills. A person can well understand something about the thing you explain, but won’t be able to tell whether the understanding is sufficiently deep, and won’t be able to specify what exactly is insufficiently clear.
Having a reliable and constructive (leading to activity that forms required understanding) sense for quality of understanding would, for example, allow one to solve textbook problems with very high degree of reliability (that is, very likely find a solution, which would very likely be correct) even given initially shallow knowledge of background material, given enough time. People rarely demonstrate this skill.
Asking the right questions and estimating the quality of own understanding are nontrivial skills. A person can well understand something about the thing you explain, but won’t be able to tell whether the understanding is sufficiently deep, and won’t be able to specify what exactly is insufficiently clear.
Having a reliable and constructive (leading to activity that forms required understanding) sense for quality of understanding would, for example, allow one to solve textbook problems with very high degree of reliability (that is, very likely find a solution, which would very likely be correct) even given initially shallow knowledge of background material, given enough time. People rarely demonstrate this skill.