(Re: Physics Enrolments

["Margaret Mazzolini" <mmazzolini@swin.edu.au>]

We have been agonizing over the same issues. A related question is, how
do you convince your head-of-department to fund teaching innovations
in your department when colleagues
will not admit that their present system is lacking in any way.

After listening to Fred Goldberg extolling the virtues of pre and 
post-testing for concept development,
we have come to the conclusion that ready availability of
good question banks for this purpose may help.  Then teaching staff who
are doing something right can show that it gets results, and compare 
the gains their students make to those of other staff or to groups using
other methods.  Until faced with the usual appalling lack of improvement
on tests like these, many teaching staff who have comfortably taught the
same courses for years are so out of touch that they do not realise that
there is any problem.

We have applied for a government grant to fund the setting up of  
windows-based question banks for introductory Physics (incorporating existing
sets of questions like the FCI where possible). While 
this is obviously not a perfect way to gauge the success of
a teaching course, it would be relatively inexpensive to carry out and
does provide something concrete to present to heads- of-departments.

Good luck with your recalcitrant professors!
Margaret Mazzolini
Swinburne University of Technology 

> Pang-Chieh,
> 	all of you suggestions are good ways to spice things up.  The
> problem we have run into here is getting professors to try new things.  I
> don't know if they are stuck in their ways or they don't want to put in
> the extra time to restructure they way they teach.
> 	Does anyone have any suggestions for getting professors to change
> the way they do things?  How do we package it for them so that it is
> appealing for them to change?  All the professors we have that are
> resistant to change have tenure, so they don't care about poor
> evaluations.  How do we kill this appethy?  These are usually the same
> professors who can CRUCIFY a great demo by over analyzing it.  It ends up
> being the students viewing an in class lab experiment.
> 	It seems that the profs who want to change things have to work
> themselves into the ground to prove that there is a better way of
> teaching. The others just drift along doing the same old thing and then
> scratch their head when we can't get new Physics majors, or we loose them.
> I sometimes wonder what world they are living in because the results are
> obvious!
> 	I think the time has come to treat it like a grape vine.  Produce
> GOOD grapes or you get pruned.  I don't care how old you are and I don't
> care what kind of grapes you used to produce.  All I care about is what
> kind of grapes you are producing now.  If you give me poor grapes, you
> will only produce poor wine.
>
> --
> James Bradford Shue                             jshue@comp.uark.edu
> University of Arkansas                          Voice phone:(501) 575-6059
> Physics Lab/Demo Curator                        FAX Number: (501) 575-4580
> WWW Page					http://comp.uark.edu/~jshue