AN ACID TEST OF UNDERSTANDING

To me, the acid test for understanding a concept or an idea, irrespective of whether it comes from a book, or a seminar, or a talk, or even just a casual conversation, is often reflected in your ability to articulate what you have learned from it, and more importantly, your ability express it in your own words.

I am always puzzled when I often asked, especially professional folks, about their learning takeaways after having read a book, or attended a seminar or even listened to a talk, I often get at best a perfunctory reply.

Worst still, in many instances, I often get a blank response.

Then, think about this: what's the point of reading a book, or attending a seminar, or listening to a talk? or, what's the point of telling the world that you had attended this talk or that seminar?

After all, as I have argued before in my earlier Facebook postings, true knowledge is measured by what you do, i.e. your productivity, and not by what's stored in your head.

Or, is it because they just don't want to share with the world at large about what they had learned?
From my own experience, personally as well as professionally, knowledge can only spiral upward if shared, as often epitomised in the axiom, 'Knowledge Shared is Power Squared'.

According to my opinion, additional aspects of the acid test of understanding will necessarily come in the form of your ability to relate your learning takeaways with what you have already mastered before, as well as your ability to mingle or juxtapose them with other known concepts or novel ideas, especially from the standpoint of using them in different contexts of personal application.

I often like to cajole folks that, if you could explain a concept or idea to your grandmother, and she could understand you clearly, then you had thoroughly understood what you had learned.

Think about it.

My take on a question in Quora:

"Is it more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than it is for them to learn facts?"

Of course, in my view, it is always more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than it is for them to learn facts.

True understanding always implies a deeper intellectual engagement with the subject.

It goes beyond conceptual coherency and personal relevancy on the part of the learner, and entails the capacity:

• to explain each idea or concept to self and/or to others in own words;
• to draw useful examples or practical illustrations from own experience;
• to connect each idea or concept to a larger scheme of things;
• to apply each idea or concept to a multitude of application contexts or settings;

Learning facts, on the other hand, is more of a memorization exercise. Rote memorisation, to be more precise, and it’s always unstable, due to the dynamic and subjective nature of memory.

In most instances, learning facts alone often poses problems of putting theory to work in the real world.

As most employers of today often lament about new college and university graduates: Good only in theory, but very poor in practice.

In more realistic terms, they can talk, but they can’t do, let alone having the personal initiative to start a project, without being supervised.

There lies the dilemma of learning too much facts in today’s colleges and universities.

I call this approach of Albert Einstein as the acid test of understanding a newly learned concept. 

It includes:

- your ability to articlate what you have just learned;

- your ability to draw examples from your own experience, to illustrate it, where feasible;

- your ability to connect it to other already-known concepts in your headspace;

- your ability to apply it intelligently in a novel or different context;

This is akin to one of the principal tenets of the famed Feynman Technique.