Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: What Does TIMSS Teach Us? (Short)(dependent learners?)



In a message dated 10/18/00 10:49:27 PM, rbtarara@SPRYNET.COM writes:

You're right, but what I see is that much of what I associate as the
'learning' process that I went through, is now being formalized into
classroom/lab exercises with a support/feedback system that was not there
when we used to meet in an empty lab every night for 3-4 hours to hammer out
the problems and to discuss the concepts. ...

...If you never have to work it out on your own, to slave over some tough
problems >without a close-by mentor, if you never have to READ IT and
understand or HEAR IT >and understand, then I don't think you will be ready
for the much less structured >world outside the academic walls.

In my experience though, as I adopt new techniques, I find that I can pose
harder questions, targeted to specific misunderstandings. Students with an
innate orientation to science and engineering are finding plenty of time to
wrestle with problems and mathematics, some on their own time, spending hours
and days in pursuit of excellence in building and racing electric cars,
exploring the logic of Euclid because it is cool to be able to inscribe a
hexagon in a circle, or building a trebuchet to fling a pumpkin 200 yards.
The reason I do projects like trebuchets is not to explore trajectories, but
to provide exactly the motivation to spend several nights in a row up until
midnight in the garage problem solving in a practical mode. These are
generally the scientists and engineers that you will meet in a few years.
From what I saw when I worked at 3M, (as a teacher on a fellowship) there was
an awful lot of collaboration and presentation in both formal and informal
sessions, as scientists and technicians hammered out the details of a project.

I definitely see the value in wrestling with problems independently. I'm not
sure I see moving through deeper waters more slowly, using different methods
for different learning styles, denies students the opportunity to do these
problems. Instead I see the chance to pose even more challenging problems.
So perhaps it is as you suggest, that the structure of the course is what is
really important, making sure that students have to confront their
understanding in situations unmediated by teacher interference as part of
their course, rather than relying on teacher technique to suddenly transform
the aristotelian thinker into a newtonian.

Personally, I doubt any one course can make a learner "Newtonian" or
"Einsteinian". Learning is holographic, and the more exposure one has to a
system, the clearer the details become.

Andrew Njaa
HS Physics and Chemistry
Falmouth ME