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Re: Homework (Was Measure of student understanding)

This very thoughtful response says a lot.

I will admit that the reformed pedagogy often requires more time to cover
certain topics in depth. At the same time the EOC exams and high stakes
testing are forcing many teachers to do nothing but teach to the test. The
situation in the humanities is that often all they teach is test review and
the students never read real books.

Not all teachers are subject to such tests. Private school teachers are
spared this, and often since physics is a senior elective the course may not
have such a test.

You mentioned 3,4,5 sections but some of us have 6 sections.

The mention of the laboratory did not quite hit the mark. The lab is used
to present the students with an unambiguous descrepent event. Research by
Renner showed that the concrete operational learners benefit greatly from
the lab, but not from book reading. Remember these are probably not future
Nobel Laureates in physics. A number of studies have showed the benefits of
MBL based labs over equivalent paper and pencil tasks. In actuality the
best reformed lab is integrated with other activities. The main reason that
labs have often been heavily emphasized is that is the area where it has
been easiest to make changes that improve learning.

I think we all agree that a good coherent course is better than a scattergun
one, and that there is no magic bullet. Indeed the various researchers who
put together the reformed curricula spent a large amount of time changing,
evaluating, rechanging and so on. They bought gains sometimes in jumps of
various sizes.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX



At 8:20 -0500 4/29/02, Rick Tarara wrote:

5) My original question remains--do courses with high FCI/FCME gains
produce better Physicists, Chemists, Biologists, Engineers, Doctors,
Accountants, Lawyers, Indian Chiefs, etc.?

And that is the only valid test of the success of any educational
method (and even then, it is difficult to evaluate). Unfortunately,
it takes years to develop such answers and that is too long a wait
for the politicians and others who are noisily clamoring for "higher
scores."

It seems to me that what all of these schemes for improving science,
and particularly physics, education have in common is that the
students receive a considerably increased level of attention. That is
accomplished either by increasing the workload of individual
teachers, giving them a number of assistants to take up some of the
load, making extensive use of electronic technology to do some of the
work, or spreading out the course material, either by reducing the
amount of material dealt with or reducing the depth at which the
material is presented, or some combination of all of the above. Most
of the time this work is done in a college-level context, because
only there is the workload of individual faculty members and the
availability of assistance such that these efforts can be undertaken.

In the secondary schools, where the workload is already punishing,
the teacher who wants to pursue one or more of these new schemes (and
some of them do show real promise of improvements), can usually do so
by only one method--reducing the amount of material covered during
the school year. However, if one looks at the end-of-course tests
that are fast becoming a fixture of secondary education, we see that
to do this is to figuratively shoot oneself in the foot. The tests
are encyclopedic--with questions about every conceivable aspect of a
subject--so that the teacher who through dint of extra work and
necessary reduction in breadth of coverage produces a class of
students with respectable or even high FCI/FCME gains, will likely be
hammered on the EOC test because he or she hasn't "covered" a large
enough fraction of the material on the test to net "higher scores."

It is not unusual for a HS teacher to have three or four, or even
five, sections of the same class, or alternatively three or four
different classes in any given term. Neither is ideal from the point
of view of effective teaching. With a typical class load of 5
sections of as many as 30 students each, it is difficult to give any
student the attention they need and deserve in that course--the very
essence of what must be done in any "active learning" program. Nor
can the immediate or in-depth feedback that is also necessary be
given to that many students.

With too many different types of classes, the problem of keeping up
with the preparation for all of them becomes overwhelming. With too
many sections of the same class, the problem of keeping them close
enough together that they don't become different classes altogether
becomes serious. Let me elaborate. We all know that every class
develops a personality of its own, some being interested in one
aspect of a topic, others in a different one. Some are active, with
lots of questions and discussion, others are passive, with almost no
interaction. Some have a few disruptive students who manage to
monopolize the teacher's time, others have one or two really strong
students who may (or may not) pull the rest of the class along with
them (such classes are a teacher's dream, but alas, are also rare).

If one looks at almost any state-mandated curriculum, one sees that
no provision is made for any of this. They simply demand that the
topics be covered from A to Z, presumably to the depth required for
the students to be able to answer a reasonable number of the EOC test
questions. While, with some of the classes mentioned above, I would
have no trouble doing this in the time allotted and even have some
time left over at the end to deal with some interesting stuff, with
others, I would be lucky get a once-over-lightly through most of the
curriculum topics.

The breadth vs. depth issue is a real one, one that is tied tightly
to the time available. The only way it will ever be resolve, IMO, is
to increase the time available. I many schools, especially those who
are going to block scheduling, the time available is not only not
increasing, it is actually decreasing. Where we have to go to get the
increased time is to earlier in the school program. We need to start
a coordinated, well-structured program of *good* science education,
including physics, as early as the fifth grade. The topics need to be
repeated each year at increasing depth so that by the time the
students get to high school they will have enough understanding of
some of the basic ideas that breadth with reasonable depth can be
achieved by committed, well-prepared teachers.

I also think we need to abandon the idea that pre-high school
teachers need to be generalists--prepared to teach all of their
subjects. What we need are science and math teachers who can move
from school to school, teaching their subjects to classes for which
the regular classroom teacher can serve as an assistant to the
"circuit-rider" in those subjects. This means that the science
teacher will see any given class perhaps only two or three times a
week, but this will go on for four or more years, allowing a
considerable amount of material to be covered in a way that will
allow the students to gain the kind of understanding that we always
hope for but seldom achieve. Having separate but coordinated physics,
chemistry and biology teachers would allow the students to reach high
school ready to delve into the deeper aspects of these subjects and
with an understanding of the unity and interconnectedness of the
sciences.

Another aspect of the problem is the different learning styles (and
teaching styles, too, for that matter) of the various students (and
teachers). Some learn by doing problems, others need the concepts
first, some need the hands-on experience of the laboratory, others
are klutzes for whom the laboratory experience is a nightmare (I was
one of those). Some can get it by reading the book, others need to
hear it told by the teacher, others have to dig in and figure it out
for themselves. Some need numbers to make sense of tit, others do
just fine with symbols and abstract ideas. Different students have
different needs at different stages in their development and probably
no class will have all in the same learning state at any given time,
so it is not a good idea, it seems to me to spend a lot of time
looking for "magic bullets" in pedagogy. We will always have to use
different ideas with different students.

While I am a firm believer that students need to understand some of
the joy and frustration of the laboratory, that is not the only place
where learning takes place, and it is not required that every student
become a good experimenter to become either a good scientist or even
someone who can understand science or its function in society. Yes,
every students needs to understand that all science stands or falls
on the results of experiment and observation, but they don't have to
know how to do it themselves. After all, being well-known disasters
in the laboratory did not keep either Pauli or Rabi from gaining a
certain eminence in physics.

I think what I'm saying is that pedagogy is fine, but it is no
substitute for a carefully structured program designed to cover the
entire school program, that takes learning styles as well as
individual students' developmental levels into account. If I could
fault PER for anything, it is my impression that they are spending
too much time looking for that "magic bullet" that will enable every
teacher to reach every student, if both will just follow the
prescribed set of rules. I don't think the world works that way.

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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