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Re: AP Physics Students



----- Original Message -----
From: "John Barrer" <forcejb@YAHOO.COM>


But I'd respectfuly suggest that the issue should not
be framed as to whether traditional methods produce
good scientists and engineers, but rather what happens
to all the other physics students (who in fact are the
majority). Let's say there was a traditional way to
teach hitting in baseball and all the .300 hitters
were interviewed to see what they thought of their
instruction. I suggest that the vast majority would
heartily endorse it. But what about the .225 hitters?
What would they say? The fact that the top 3-4% of the
population can make the conceptual connections given
traditional instruction (ie, heavy emphasis on
quantittaive problems) says, IMHO, nothing about
whether or not this is the best approach for the
majority of our students. John Barrere

The unanswered question here remains "What is the best TYPE of physics
course for different types of students?" While we would like all students
to exit our courses knowing the concepts and be able to solve all types of
problems like 'experts', we know that when we're dealing with a single,
terminal course in physics, such will hardly ever be the case. It is clear
that our intro courses have NOT provided strong conceptual knowledge nor
have they produced 'expert' problem solvers. It would seem, however, that
the overall physics curriculum provides the necessary stimuli to produce
productive scientists and engineers, but one can certainly question whether
a different curriculum would do even better (but of course it might do
worse). What about education students? Here I would offer that strong
CONCEPTUAL understanding is perhaps of primary importance to this group
(although we've heard the opinion that this can't be developed without
commensurate quantitative skills). After all, who is so concerned with the
lack of conceptual understanding coming from our 'traditional' courses?
Physics educators--US. We recognize how important such understanding is to
our ability to teach (well that's a circular path if indeed we haven't been
teaching well) and also recognize that most of us didn't get our
understanding early in our course work. It seems to me that much of the PER
work is focused on 'fixing' this problem. However...what about General
Education students who take Physics as their science course? How valuable
is it to them that they understand Newton's Laws (and other basic concepts)?
How valuable is it to them to have at least one concentrated experience with
quantitative logic and problem solving? How valuable is it to them to have
an overview of how Physics has helped shape their society and the technology
that runs it? You can make strong arguments for any of the three goals
above, but they represent three DIFFERENT types of courses.

I don't see any absolutes here. Active engagement techniques may well be
the best way to 'teach' concepts, but may not be the best way to approach a
Physics in Society course or even a quantitative emphasis course. Branding
traditional courses as 'totally ineffectual' doesn't help. Who benefits
best from which type of course? My own prejudice is that education students
need the concepts course, most Gen-Ed students the Physics in Society
course, science and engineering students (not physics majors) would probably
benefit most from the quantitative emphasis (with as much conceptual work as
can fit), while physics majors really need both the conceptual and
quantitative work. For this last group the question remains how best to do
that--start out with the concepts and then later fold in the problem
solving, turn it around, mix it all the way through? We've seen arguments
for all approaches here. We won't have any truly meaningful measure of PER
initiatives (vis a vis physics majors) until graduates of 'new' programs
start to enter graduate schools in competition with students from more
traditional (some can read 'foreign') programs. The results of PER on
other types of students will of course have to be measured in other ways.

Rick

**********************************************
Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556
rtarara@saintmarys.edu

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