I remember one dreadful experience with congruence that I experienced in a biology class during my undergraduate studies. At that point I was in no way interested in science. I was a music major, but science was a requirement. (I feel quite differently now!) We did a field activity that involved collecting a certain amount of water from a pond and examining it to see what was in it. That part was fine, and I did find it interesting to see what the sample contained.
However, on the final exam for the course there was a question that asked how to determine the volume of water in a pond. I used my imagination and came up with an approach that I thought would work. I got a terrible mark on it. Turns out that something in the field activity was about calculating the volume of water in the pond, but I had missed that part entirely. I could have described what we did at that point, but I had no idea it had anything to do with the calculation of volume.
Upon reflection, I see that what was missing for me was the clear idea of what it was that I was expected to learn. I think the professor could have improved it for me by perhaps writing down what we were to be learning before we headed out to the field or possibly having a group discussion after the field activity to solidify the learning. On the bright side, I did remember a lot of the interesting creatures I looked at through the microscope for quite a while, but that was not the point of the exercise.
