Plain English Meaning

The different ways people come to know things. In teaching pilots, instructors recognize that students learn from trusted sources, from doing, from thinking it through, from gut feel, and from tested evidence — and good instruction draws on all of them.

Full Definition

In aviation instruction, the recognized origins from which knowledge is acquired and validated. These are commonly grouped into five categories: authority (accepting information from a credible source), experience (knowledge gained through direct personal involvement), reasoning (deductive or inductive thinking from known facts), intuition (knowing something without conscious reasoning), and the scientific method (knowledge gained through systematic observation, hypothesis, and testing).

Context Anchor

Seen in the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook when discussing how learners acquire knowledge and how instructors should present information so it can be understood and used.

Derivation

Source comes from an old word meaning a spring or starting point, like the place water begins. Knowledge comes from older words meaning to know or recognize. Together, the phrase points to the starting points from which a ’s develops.