A counterexample is a variant of the typical mind fallacy: if you perfectly understand something, it feels so obvious that you tend to forget what was not obvious before. So professors are regularly worse at explaining a difficult concept than teaching assistants: because the latter still know what makes it hard to understand.
Does glossing over large inferential distances correlate with poor understanding? I’d expect no. A teacher who is leaving big chunks of an argument as exercises for the reader is a poor communicator, but their failure is in modeling the listener and not necessarily understanding the subject. They may talk like that about everything.
Your point is more broad and you acknowledged it’s not always true, but this specific failure mode doesn’t seem correlated with understanding. You can understand something very well but will fail at walking someone to your conclusion if you make false assumptions about your audience’s knowledge or processing speed. See bad physics professors as an example of this.
Is this anecdotal, or research-based? I’ve always heard somewhat the opposite regarding your second point. Although, I could not find any significant sources on the subject.
While not always the case, poor explanations usually point to poor understanding. Same with cluttered writing.
A counterexample is a variant of the typical mind fallacy: if you perfectly understand something, it feels so obvious that you tend to forget what was not obvious before. So professors are regularly worse at explaining a difficult concept than teaching assistants: because the latter still know what makes it hard to understand.
Does glossing over large inferential distances correlate with poor understanding? I’d expect no. A teacher who is leaving big chunks of an argument as exercises for the reader is a poor communicator, but their failure is in modeling the listener and not necessarily understanding the subject. They may talk like that about everything.
Your point is more broad and you acknowledged it’s not always true, but this specific failure mode doesn’t seem correlated with understanding. You can understand something very well but will fail at walking someone to your conclusion if you make false assumptions about your audience’s knowledge or processing speed. See bad physics professors as an example of this.
Is this anecdotal, or research-based? I’ve always heard somewhat the opposite regarding your second point. Although, I could not find any significant sources on the subject.