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Re: Ten Learning Principles - Worthwhile or Not?

At 12:24 AM -0600 1/30/02, Jack Uretsky wrote:
Hi all-
There is a glaring difference between the educational research
and the physics research the I have seen. The educational exeriments seem
to be generally designed and conducted for the purpose of proving the
correctness of an educational theory. Physics experiments are generally
designed and conducted for the purpose of disproving a physical theory.
That is why there are many experimental physics papers labeled "Search for
..." (with the implication that the search was unsuccessful) and the
result being an upper or lower bound on the value of some conjectured
quantity (today's seminar comes to mind, the subject was proton decay).
How many educational experimental papers have you seen where the
proponent of a new educational theory reported on the unsuccess of the
theory? Yet it is valuable to know the techniques that are
enthusiastically tried and don't work.
Regards,
Jack

At 10:11 AM -0500 1/30/02, Herbert H Gottlieb wrote:
I believe that it was Confucius who once said that
"All education experiments are doomed to success".

Herb Gottlieb from New York City
Where education research is always 100% successful


Well, my dissertation was about writing across the curriculum--specifically
writing in physics classes _to help students learn physics_. The
educational theories all said it should work (i.e. writing about physics
should help students learn physics). My dissertation committee, made up
mostly of education professors, was not at all happy about the negative
results I obtained (the negative results were even contrary to my own
personal expectations).

Yes, there are too many variables to control for in educational research
and there are plenty of possible explanations for my negative results; but
I just wanted to cite one case of an educational experiment which did not
support the applicable theories.

I cannot, however, report that the theories were revised to accommodate my
experimental results (and maybe they shouldn't be since there really are
too many variables to control for and hard conclusions are impossible from
one educational experiment).

Larry