Anconcephaly is a type of Starting Point Learning Challenge where the student lacks any knowledge of the concept at all. Students with anconcephaly must respond with “I don’t know” to diagnostic questions; if they guess, they have randomitis. However, students who have perseverosis or hypoconfidencia might also respond with “I don’t know”, so getting an “IDK” response narrows it down, but does not conclusively mean that the learner has anconcephaly.
Sometimes this is just a Judgement Allergy misdiagnosed as being anconcephaly.
Trivia: Rohen came up with the name based on the medical condition of Anencephaly, where a human is born without a brain. This captures the fact that the student’s understanding of the concept … lacks the concept itself. Hence the name anconcephaly (which almost has the entire word “concept” in it).
Example:
Teacher: So, what exactly does a quadratic equation mean?
Student: I don’t know.
Teacher: Have you ever seen that word before at least? “Quadratic”?
Student: I think so? I’m not sure.
Teacher: Do you know what a “parabola” means?
Student: Kind of – it’s like a graph right?
Teacher: What makes a parabola different from a line?
Student: I don’t know.
When a student responds like this, the best thing is to explain the concept from scratch – they likely don’t have particular misconceptions because they have no conception of the topic at all. Of course in the process of going over the material, if their memories trigger and they do in fact have a pre-existing idea of the topic, the teacher can then proceed to see whether there are particular misconceptions.