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From the didactic manner in which concepts (particularly scientific concepts) are forced on students in early schooling, it is little wonder that they acquire almost no sense of the process of operational definition and that they come to view concepts as rigid, unchanging entities with one absolute significance that the initiated automatically "know" and that the breathless student must acquire in one intuitive gulp. It comes as a revelation and a profound relief to many students when they are allowed to see that concepts evolve; that they go through a sequence of redefinition, sharpening, and refinement; that one starts at crude, initial, intuitive levels and, profiting from insights gained in successive applications, develops the concept to final sophistication.
In my own courses, I indicate from the first day that we will operate under the precept "idea first and name afterwards" and that scientific terms acquire meaning only through the description of shared experience in words of prior definition. When students try to exhibit erudition (or take refuge from questioning) by name dropping technical terms that have not yet been defined, I and my staff go completely blank and uncomprehending. Students catch on to this game quite quickly. They cease name dropping and being to recognize, on their own, when they do not understand the meaning of a term. Then they start drifting in to tell us of instances in which they got into trouble in a psychology, or sociology, or economics, or political science course by asking for operational meaning of technical terms. It is interesting that this is an aspect of cognitive development to which many students break through relatively quickly and easily. Unfortunately, this is not true of most other modes of abstract logical reasoning.
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