It's a very depressing study overall: " When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own."
I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers, and my list will quickly start to include folks who are more mathematicians, like Chebyshev. And we have the advantage that we literally use equations named after these guys!
Names are trivia, imo. The memorization of trivia is… it happens of course, but it is just a symptom of learning.
> I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers
Unlike engineering, the whole English literature curriculum in high school is built around reading particular works by particular historical writers. The highlights of nineteenth-century literature should have been well covered in high school (and beyond - some of these people are seniors in college!). An English major who cannot remember any works or authors from the nineteenth century would be equivalent to engineering major who can't remember any algebra.
Random funny story (presented with a devious agenda of course)—I tutored folks in an “math for non-stem majors” sort of math class in college. I was pretty good at it generally (I think as an engineering student I was closer to their material than the math students, who’d all long ago moved on to the big-brain stuff). But at some point they started asking about foils, which was pretty confusing (they weren’t looking for anachronistically named projector slides, challenging me to a duel, or preserving their lunch). It turns out FOIL is a mnemonic for applying the distributive property twice, which I’d never seen, having just remembered the underlying thing directly.
I wonder if these college English students have similarly forgotten some names? I guess that’s sort of a long shot. I do think memorization of facts should be avoided, though, whenever it is possible to instead integrate the underlying principle into your mental model instead.
Ignoring the first three, the rest I've mentally bucketed into "inventor" and not "engineer". And that's assuming I have them associated with the right century - definitely would have excluded the Wright brothers anyway because of that.
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The aircraft we fly today is the same design as the Wright Brothers. They solved the control problem. They did wind tunnel studies. And yet you claim they're "not engineers."
As the joke goes, 'I want some of what he's smoking.' Just. Wow.
When did I ever claim they're not engineers? I said I mentally bucketed them into "inventor" instead of "engineer". People can be more than one thing at once, it's just not the association I have in my mind, so they don't come to mind when I try to think of engineers.
This study can't see past its own midwit view that there is an objective “detailed, literal” reading that necessarily produces the same interpretation of the text that the authors have.
The students in the study are responding in a rational way to the way HS English is taught: the pretense is that you're deriving meaning/themes/symbolism from the text, but these interpretations are often totally made-up[^0] to the extent that authors can't answer the standardized tests about their own work[^1]. The real task is then to flatter the teacher/professor/test-setter's preconceptions about the work — and if the goal is to guess some external source's perspective, why shouldn't that external source be SparkNotes?
This ambivalent literalism is evident in the paper itself:
- one student is criticized for "imagin[ing] dinosaurs lumbering around London", because the authors think this language is obviously "figurative". But it's totally plausible that Dickens was a notch more literal than only describing the mud as prehistoric! In the mid-1850s the first descriptions and statues of dinosaurs were being produced, there was a common theory that prehistoric lizards were as developed as present mammals, so maybe he's referring to (or making fun of) that idea?
- the authors criticize readers for relying on SparkNotes instead of looking up individual words in the dictionary. But "Chancery" has ~8 definitions, only one of which is about a court and "advocate" has ~4. Is it more competent to guess which of those 32 combinations is correct, or to look up the meaning of the whole passage instead? There's whole texts dedicated to explaining other texts, especially old ones — does pulling from those make you a bad reader?
- they say that a student only locates the fog vaguely rather than seeing that "it moves throughout the shipyards". That's not in the text though: the fog is only described as moving laterally in two of the locations, and never between different parts of the yard. Maybe the fog is instead being generated in each ship and by each person, as is the confusion in the High Court of Chancery? (More pedantically still: are all these boats just being built? If not, wouldn't they be at docks or wharfs rather than shipyards?)
I think the underlying implicit belief is that there is always one correct interpretation of the text, at one exactly correct level of literalness, derivable from only the text itself. But by the points students are in college they will have been continuously rebuffed for attempting literal interpretations that don't produce the required result, and unsurprisingly they end up unsure which parts of understanding are mechanical and which are imaginative.
[0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
It's a very depressing study overall: " When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own."