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Re: Graphing by Hand


We just did our first "formal" graphing exercise in lab yesterday. The
number of students who were absolutely clueless about how to place data on
a graph was so large (>50% - and these are College students) that I believe
abandoning the exercise would be a mistake.

They need to know what the graphs are before they learn a set of keystrokes
which make the graphs for them. IMHO.

BTW - we do move quickly to computer-generated graphs, but insist that they
interpret the graphs rather than simply print them and say "gee, that's
pretty!"
George Spagna **********************************************

In the late 1980's when people first started using MBL, they found that
they did not have to have students first make their own graphs before they
could make sense of and reason from the graphs. Furthermore, they found
that students who had started with MBL produced graphs and come to reason
with them, when the were asked to make graphs by hand DID seem to have a
clue about setting up axes and plotting the data. I do not have a
reference off-hand, but I believe John Layman would. He was involved in
some of this work out at Berkeley.

Dewey

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Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr. Phone: (208)385-3105
Professor of Physics Dept: (208)385-3775
Department of Physics/MCF421/418 Fax: (208)385-4330
Boise State University dykstrad@bsumail.idbsu.edu
1910 University Drive Boise Highlanders
Boise, ID 83725-1570 novice piper

"Physical concepts are the free creations of the human mind and
are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external
world."--A. Einstein in The Evolution of Physics with L. Infeld,
1938
"Don't mistake your watermelon for the universe." --K. Amdahl in
There Are No Electrons, 1991.
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