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Interesting investigations of cognitive skill and maturity are conducted by administering test questions or problems in which some necessary datum or bit of information has been deliberately omitted, and the question cannot be answered without securing the added information or making some plausible assumption that closes the gap. Most students and many mature adults perform very feebly on these tests. They have had little practice in such analytical thinking and fail to recognize, on their own, that information is missing. If they are told that this is the case, some will identify the gap on reexamining the problem, but many will still fail to make the specific identification.
In our subject matter courses, regardless of how carefully we try to examine evidence and validate our models and concepts, it will occasionally be necessary to ask students to take something on faith. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but it should never be done without making the students aware of what evidence is lacking and exactly what they are taking on faith. Without such care, they do not establishing a frame of reference from which to judge their level of knowledge, and they fail to discriminate clearly those instances in which evidence has been provided from those in which it has not.
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