Insight Quotient (InQ): How to discover what it means to have learned something

Abstract

In engineering education, students often pass exams without actually learning something. This is evidenced by the fact that when they come back the following semester most of them seem to have “forgotten” the work that was covered in the subjects that they had passed. Further, the examination process can allow students to pass on submissions that have no actual meaning for the students themselves. This two-way arrangement colludes in creating a culture of “passing” rather than learning in many higher education departments. At present we don’t have a way of knowing if each student’s knowledge is embedded in long-term memory and if this information is sufficiently cross linked in a student’s brain to give it significance. This results in students “passing” at lower levels only to find that they don’t have the underlying knowledge for the higher levels, instead of actually learning properly from the beginning. In order to get around this problematic state of affairs a new approach is put forward which is based on the findings of neuroscience. This new approach involves the development of the Insight Quotient (InQ) of students and lectures alike. The purpose of this approach is to bring to conscious awareness what learning actually consists of (as far as this is possible), by eliciting the subconscious underlying elements that make up the knowledge of things. In this way both students and lecturers can have a way of determining the presence or absence of learning. Most importantly, by having a means to scrutinise the structure and content of their learning, students can become responsible for the levels of learning they achieve.