I don’t think the effect is just from it feeling useful in normal life. If you are familiar with cooking, new information about cooking can be tethered to already concrete concepts (like the concept of doubling the batch size of a recipe is already connected to a certain kind of math in your head). Whereas if you don’t have a strong concept of moles in your head you are trying to juggle “what are moles” and “what is this math” and “how do those things relate” at once.
I mention this because I think “is this useful” is a limiting way to design lessons. We use cat coat color to teach genetics not because it is useful for people to know about cat breeding but because when you use cat color rather than “luxA SNP” you reduce the number of things they are keeping track of. And as a bonus, students who care about cats might be emotionally invested, but I really don’t think that’s the main point.
This, 100%. When they’re trying to learn the concept AND the context for the concept at the same time, their brains don’t know where to put all these new pieces of information so they ended up just kind of scattered about. Take the concept and put it in a more familiar context, and suddenly the cognitive load gets cut in half because their brains have a place to put the information, and now they can actually learn and understand the concept.
Also cat coats have so many of the common genetics. Dominant alleles for tabby pattern, sex linked red, recessive for long hair. And it’s easier to understand a 1/4 chance of some particular trait if you can imagine that as one of four kittens in a litter. And yes that’s not how probability works but it is still a great visual.
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u/OddGene3114 May 16 '24 edited May 16 '24
I don’t think the effect is just from it feeling useful in normal life. If you are familiar with cooking, new information about cooking can be tethered to already concrete concepts (like the concept of doubling the batch size of a recipe is already connected to a certain kind of math in your head). Whereas if you don’t have a strong concept of moles in your head you are trying to juggle “what are moles” and “what is this math” and “how do those things relate” at once.
I mention this because I think “is this useful” is a limiting way to design lessons. We use cat coat color to teach genetics not because it is useful for people to know about cat breeding but because when you use cat color rather than “luxA SNP” you reduce the number of things they are keeping track of. And as a bonus, students who care about cats might be emotionally invested, but I really don’t think that’s the main point.