The cognitive processes of people doing science and engineering
There's a bunch of research about what seems to be going on in the heads of small children who are learning to read or count, a lot of it also seems to be used in attempts to make them learn better. Try asking what you should expect to see happening in the heads of university students successfully learning mathematical physics or trained scientists doing their stuff, and there seems to be next to nothing. Math and science education is cognitively very demanding, and seems to be mostly uninterested in the cognitive strategies the students should try to develop to master the subject material.
Human cognition at this level might be too complex to get a handle on with any reasonable amount of work, but that doesn't quite explain the sink-or-swim apathy that seems to be the common attitude towards getting students to understand advanced math.
Less Wrong is a large community of very smart people with a wide spectrum of expertise, and I think relatively little of that value has been tapped.
Like my post The Best Textbooks on Every Subject, this is meant to be a community-driven post. The first goal is to identify topics the Less Wrong community would like to read more about. The second goal is to encourage Less Wrongers to write on those topics. (Respecting, of course, the implicit and fuzzy guidelines for what should be posted to Less Wrong.)
One problem is that those with expertise on a subject don't necessarily feel competent to write a front-page post on it. If that's the case, please comment here explaining that you might be able to write one of the requested posts, but you'd like a writing collaborator. We'll try to find you one.
Rules
You may either:
or...
I will regularly update the list of suggested Less Wrong posts, ranking them in descending order of votes (like this).
The List So Far (updated 02/11/11)