Re: Conceptual Tests

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 16:18 -0600 2/18/02, Tina Fanetti wrote:
> Also, she doenst want conceptual evaluations.  She wants them to work=
>  problems.  I tell her that is not where the research is pointing but=
>  she says that conceptual is unfair.
There is certainly quite a bit of evidence out there that students
can solve problems of surprising complexity without really
understanding what they are doing. This is probably very non-PC,
especially in the PER community, but I'm not all that sure that's
(that is, solving problems without understanding the ideas)
necessarily a bad thing. We all know that conceptual understanding of
a physical concept is often difficult to achieve. I suspect that at
least some success can be gained by getting the students to solve
some problems. After all, success is a great breeder of confidence,
and if they can solve problems, they may well be more receptive to
the work necessary to get the conceptual ideas assimilated.

I have a friend who just says, "Get them solving problems.
Understanding can come later." I think there is some wisdom here. I
suspect most of us on this list will admit that their level of
understanding of concepts got it greatest push when we started
teaching. That certainly was true with me. After a few years of
teaching, I looked back on my understanding of the ideas of
introductory physics and was appalled at my level of ignorance.

Of course, the ideal would be to bring along the conceptual and the
computational maturity together, but that may not work very often. My
experience, with myself, and with students, indicates that
computational maturity generally comes first, conceptual maturity
later. And knowing how to solve a problem is certainly more
satisfying than understanding the problem but not knowing how to deal
with it mathematically.

We all hate it when students ask, "What formula do I need to solve
this problem?" But that may be a first step on the road to eventual
understanding. Do students who can ace the FCI but are unable to
solve a simple kinematics problem really feel good about their
physics experience? Do we want a bunch of people out there who feel
their physics experience was a waste of time?

I know that, in the long run, the student who has gained the
conceptual understanding, once having developed the computational
skills will be well ahead of the student whose conceptual
understanding is weak, regardless of their computational skills. But
I think that we are over-emphasizing the very difficult conceptual
development, which leaves many students frustrated, when we could be
teaching them some easier computational concepts (there are several
introductory concepts that can profitably be handled algorithmically,
to the great profit of the students, even if they don't fully
understand what they are doing) that will leave them feeling good
about what they can do, and maybe leave them open to continuing to
get the conceptual understanding when they are more mature and able
to handle these more difficult tasks.

Just my $0.02 worth.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
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