... a response that seems somewhat of a non-sequitur from the post of yours to which I responded, and to the OP. In those you talked about
the meaning of the word "causes",
philosophers of causality, and
a discussion about when it is ok to say that A causes B, about the language we use.
I tried to meet you at your own level and address the question which you purported to want input on. I gave you a response that dealt specifically with the semantic issues you raised. You have chosen not to directly address anything I said. You don't seem to have liked where that discussion was headed. Instead, you seem to have shifted from semantics to effective teaching. Without saying so in so many words, your response seems to amount to "
saying 'A causes B under condition 1 and causes (not B), otherwise' is too complex for students to grasp, so we should tell them 'Generally A causes B. There are a few rare exceptions that we'll deal with later.'"
So you want to shift the field of discussion from semantics to effective pedagogy. OK, I'll accommodate you again. Your approach is setting student up for failure at the point where they encounter those exceptions. By then, the students have entrenched a fundamentally wrong conceptual model. To make sense of the exceptions, the successful student will have to throw out the model you have been building to that point and replace it with a different one. That is an inefficient way to teach, and prone to greater failure.
When B is "greater image noisiness", the correct general statement of causation is "C causes B", where C is "decreased exposure". No need to resort to "contributory causes". No need to deal with exceptions which you will relegate to dealing with at some unspecified time. Dealing with exceptions later destabilizes conceptual models. "C causes B" has more simplicity and is therefor easier for students to grasp than your proposal. And it has no exceptions, so there is no need for a later radical adjustment to the conceptual model.
Do you actually have formal training in pedagogy? What you have written here doesn't sound to me like you do.
For ten years I held a position in which I was responsible for the quality of education received by tens of thousands of students. You can be sure that during that time I had more professional upgrading in pedagogical method than did the average teacher. I consulted with leading national experts from several different countries. I wasn't limited to instruction received at just one average teacher's college.
Ysarex and bobn2 both taught at the post-secondary level, and both seem convinced of the importance of emphasizing the relationship between noise and exposure. Both have also talked about the damage done when students have to adjust their conceptual model from an early-formed incorrect model to a different model later on.
my experience has been that students are not like computers; they do not hang on every word I say and interpret each word exactly and precisely like a computer processes a computer program.
Some will, some won't. All will start to build a conceptual model as they take in whatever words they do pay attention to.
With beginners, after telling them the way they can use ISO to change how they choose shutter speed and aperture,
I think that is a backwards way to look at ISO that is just perpetuating a film-centric approach to understanding camera-controls. ISO is not a noise control or an exposure control. It is a lightness control, and it's use ought to be taught in that context.
I think it would be perfectly ok to say something like:
"As a general rule, whenever you increase the ISO, there is a penalty to pay in reduced image quality [then show some examples of low ISO and high ISO images and maybe introduce the term "noise"]. As with all good rules, however, there are some exceptions. These exceptions are rare and we will ignore them for the time being."
And I think that's a lousy way to instruct beginners because it implants at the beginning of the formation of their internal conceptual models that the primary association of noise is with ISO, rather than that noise is primarily and causally associated with exposure. The time to introduce "noise" is when you are explaining exposure, not when you are explaining ISO. That's because it is exposure that is the primary factor affecting the noisiness of an image. This also means you don't have to deal later with the rare exceptions that overturn your general layout of the conceptual model because, unlike the non-causal relationship of ISO to noisiness, there are no exceptions to the causal relationship between exposure and noisiness.
I think it is guaranteed that you will be labelled as a boring teacher if you try to explain all the exceptions whenever you introduce a new rule.
So the choice is to either leave the exceptions to later while initially forming an incorrect conceptual model, or to teach something where there actually are no exceptions.
And students learn less from boring teachers and that is often why they misapply the rules.
The problem is, in your approach, you haven't actually taught them the rule. Instead of a rule incorporating direct causation, you have taught them a non-causal correlation that only holds under specific conditions, and you have failed to describe what happens when those conditions do not apply. That's not a rule.
