Keeley et al: Uncovering Student Ideas in Science

This article was incredibly frustrating for me. As an introduction to a larger work, I kept wishing I could skip ahead to Chapter 1! (and then flip back and read the Introduction of course). If I read "the probes in this book" one more time I was about to pop. I kept reading and reading expecting an example any time now to make sense of all the theories and reasons behind "assessment probes." I'm afraid I totally missed the content, since others seem to have gathered much better information from the article/chapter. Maybe the theories and reasons behind Assessment Probes were the content? but the way everything was worded looking forward to the Assessment Probes behind the curtain, I just couldn't understand the introduction without a glimpse of the real thing.

I do agree that assessment probes (from what I gathered) are a good idea. They don't really sound like a novel concept though. We have already been talking about determining students' prior knowledge and misconceptions before constructing new knowledge and learning.
What makes an "assessment probe" different from pre-assessment (informal or formal)? Maybe if there was an explicit example I would know!

I'm sure that the whole book is great, and I'm surprisingly curious to read it because the Introduction seemed so geared to the monster at the end of this book. However, when authors go back to write an introduction, they seem to subconsciously forget that the Reader has NOT read the book yet...in their nuances of language. Dear Writer, Please oh please do not  expound upon topics that have been defined but not seen yet.

*hmph*