Chapter 1 : Observation Skills

Those of you who discovered something new from these exercises learned because you observed in its true sense of staying awake and closely attentive.
Observation is a process of sensing, perceiving, and thinking. Careful observation can help us see details that contain the key to unlocking problems or arriving at insights. It also help us discover new knowledge. It also requires us to stay awake, take out time, given full attention, suspend thinking in an attitude of listening.
Therefore you became aware of details, which a sweeping glance would have missed, in your subjects that revealed significance about the whole.
Observation is a process of sensing, perceiving, and thinking. Sensing is collecting data through the sense organs. Perceiving is holding sense data in consciousness until we can categorize and interpret it. The rewards of cultivating observation skills are self-understanding, creativity, rapture power, and wonder.

Thinking for Yourself Chapter 1 Quiz Page 38~39
1. FALSE Observation skills are learned mainly through book learning. Support for Answers. On the contrary, observation is learned from participation, which is more active and spontaneous than reading. Samuel Scudder learned observing through the active coaching of his teacher Agassiz as well as from his own efforts, curiosity, and persistence in studying his fish.

2. TRUE The standard academic study of all the physical sciences requires observation skills, whether in the field or laboratory.
3. TRUE In thinking, the correctness of our conclusions usually depends on the clarity of our perceptions. 

4. TRUE Observation skills can be extended to observing how you observe. 

5. TRUE An insight is an experience of understanding that can occur spontaneously after we observe something intently for a while. One illustration of this experience is the story of Archimedes, who, while in his bath, discovered the means of measuring the value of an irregular solid by the displacement of water.

6. FALSE Agassize was simply too busy to give his student all the assistance he needed.
7. TRUE Perception and sensation are synonyms.
8. TRUE It is difficult to feel sensation and to think at the same time. If we want to feel whether a pair of new shoes fits properly, we have to pay attention.

9. TRUE Assimilation, according to Piaget, is an experience of easily understanding something that readily fits into our preexisting schemes or world view.

10. FALSE The word thinking, according to the dictionary, has only one meaning.