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whales comments on Open thread, 11-17 August 2014 - Less Wrong
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In the last open thread Lumifer linked to a list by the American Statistical Association with points that need to be understood to be considered statistically literate. In the same open thread in another comment sixes_and_sevens asked for statements we know are true but the average lay person gets wrong. As response he mainly got examples from the natural sciences and mathematics. Which makes me wonder, can we make a general test of education in all of these fields of knowledge that can be automatically graded? This test would serve as a benchmark for traditional educational methods and for autodidacts checking themselves.
I imagine having simple calculations for some things and multiple-choice tests for other scenarios where intuition suffices.
Edit: Please don't just upvote, try to point to similar ideas in your respective field or critique the idea.
There are concept inventories in a lot of fields, but these vary in quality and usefulness. The most well-known of these is the Force Concept Inventory for first semester mechanics, which basically aims to test how Aristotelian/Newtonian a student's thinking is. Any physicist can point out a dozen problems with it, but it seems to very roughly measure what it claims to measure.
Russ Roberts (host of the podcast EconTalk) likes to talk about the "economic way of thinking" and has written and gathered links about ten key ideas like incentives, markets, externalities, etc. But he's relatively libertarian, so the ideas he chose and his exposition will probably not provide a very complete picture. Anyway, EconTalk has started asking discussion questions after each podcast, some of which aim to test basic understanding along these lines.