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Re: Effectiveness of Working Sample Problems



On Fri, 19 Sep 1997 17:54:07 -0600 (CDT) Joel Cannon said:
Can anyone point me towards research into how effective working sample
problems are to learning physics? I recall being told at different
times by people involved in physics education research that if
students are interviewed after such an exercise, the students leaving
the class will show virtually no difference in understanding compared to a
control group who have seen or heard nothing. In short, one of our standard
approaches to teaching may have no benefit.

I always have a big problem with this kind of research. The problem is so
complex that I believe it is impossible to isolate a single variable and draw
any meaningful conclusion. In fact it is a mistake to try to isolate the
variables because they are not independent. The correct answer to this
kind of questions must be "it depends on ...." All research on this question
can really tell us is what % of the time do enough things fall into place
for the sample to be effective. For some teachers this may be nearly all the
time and for others almost never. A much more meanful question than how does
it work for others is "How does it work for you and me", and there is no
reason to think we are any where near the average. However, our students can
tell us, and they do, so I think if we are awake at all we can all answer
this question much more accurately for ourselves than any answer we can get
from published literature, and I think it is a question that each of us must
answer for ourselves. Others can tell us what works for them, but ultimately,
we have to figure out what works for us.

The other side of this is that everything is a compromise and nothing works
all the time, so we can never be satisfied, even if we are employing the
methods favored by the current research.