6 Questions Your Student Needs to be Able to Answer: Strange Bedfellows
Why would someone say that frisbees, microwave ovens, and Velcro are “strange bedfellows”? To answer this, you’d have to know their origins, the stories behind the inventions.
In the 1940’s Yale students sailed pie tins through the air and played catch. Ten years later, Walter Frederick Morrison, a flying-saucer enthusiast, improved on the idea. Morrison and the company Wham-O produced and sold a saucer-like disk which they called a Frisbee. It was named after the baker William Russel Frisbie whose reusable pie tins in the 1870’s provided the original source of the fun.
During World War II, Britain’s radar system used microwaves to track Nazi warplanes. Several years later, Percy LeBaron Spencer discovered they could also cook food when he accidentally came into contact with a microwave that melted a candy bar in his pocket. Many experiments later, the first microwave oven was put on sale in 1954.
George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, returned from a walk outside one day in 1948 to find some cockleburs clinging to his jacket. He took one off and upon examining it under a microscope, he found a maze of thin strands with little hooks on each end that caused them to cling to fabrics. Eight years and many experiments later, Mestral had created a new fastener: Velcro!
These three inventions, “strange bedfellows” if you will, only came about by thinking on the synthesis level. Questions that require this level of thinking make up the 5th step on our staircase of steps I’ve been discussing recently. While these kinds of questions appear on achievement tests, they’re rare. They’re hard to write.
Questions or tasks that require thinking on the synthesis level often include words such as:
- Assemble
- Build
- Compose
- Create
- Develop
- Devise
- Design
- Formulate
- Integrate
- Modify
- Organize
- Plan
- Propose
- Rearrange
- Revise
- Rewrite
While synthesis thinking results in the creation of something new and different, it does not take place in a vacuum. Students typically first possess a level of skills and information and then apply them with rigor and structure. Top artists, athletes, actors, and musicians spend innumerable hours studying, practicing, and perfecting their discipline before reaching the level of excellence that brings about regional, national, or even international notoriety.
I make suggestions on ways to cultivate synthesis thinking in children in our e-book, How to Ask Questions That Matter. It may be purchased at half the regular price when you sign up for remote achievement testing this year.
Next time I’ll discuss the top step, the hardest kind of question to answer, in our staircase of steps.
Thanks for reading!
Curt Bumcrot, MRE
We’re currently signing up students to participate in remote group test. Our first group test date is May 8. The registration deadline is April 29th. If you’re interested in signing up, click here for more information. Feel free to call (503-650-5282) or email if you have additional questions.
