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Re: Less is less





1. Sadler's famous study among others shows clearly that less is more
- as measured by student success in college physics.

Chris Horton


While this data cannot be refuted, I'd like some advice from the
advocates of "less is more" of how to implement this into a
standard 4-year
college physics major. As we do less in the Intro. course, the students
come less prepared into say, Modern, then less prepared into Mechanics,
etc. As we actually do less in our courses, the refrain of
"didn't you see
a bit of this topic in course xxx?" is heard more and more in our classes,
especially at the upper level. In order for better learning do we need to
expand the college degree to 5 years (and another $35,000 for the
parents :) )?


This is indeed a dilemma, however the didn't you cover that topic question
also applies to topics that were covered an inch deep. When a student comes
in saying, yes we covered NTNs laws, but it is obvious that they do not have
much understanding of them, what value is also having covered optics, waves,
energy ... in similar fashion?

I would submit that the main job of a well taught physics course should be
to equip the students to be able to understand and think about the topics.
Such students have actually learned skills in thinking, and can then apply
these skills to the next course. Such students can then easily pick up some
topics on their own, because they have tools they can use to decipher and
understand physics topics. I had a student who acutely did that. He had a
physics professor in college that just worked the problems out of the book.
He sensibly skipped lecture and read the book himself. He did quite well.

Two studies come to mind in this respect. The work of Shayer and Adey shows
that when middle school children have been taught to think by "Thinking
Science" their test scores 4 years later show a 20% rise, but immediate test
scores do not show much difference. Essentially the students have been put
on a steeper learning curve, or they have been accelerated. The implication
here is that the earlier courses may be able to slow down, but once the
students have accelerated there may be a point in later courses where more
material may be covered.

A study by Anton Lawson showed that biology student grades in a college
course were dependent on the thinking level of the students, but did not
seem to depend at all on previous material "learned" in HS or on a pretest
of biology material. Students who took 3 years of HS biology did no better
than students who took no HS biology. The pretest, which was fairly simple,
also was not a good predictor. The pretest revealed that students came in
knowing essentially no biology, just the same as the FCI often shows that
students come in with no understanding of physics.

When I was at Rensselaer in the 60s they taught undergrad physics as a 4
semester sequence with different topics each semester. This was actually a
good idea in light of current studies about learning, but it was doubtful
that they actually achieved the desired goal of improving depth of coverage.

While some of this problem can be attacked at the college level, ultimately
the quality of instruction must be improved at the lower levels of
education. 70% of graduating HS students should be capable of operating at
the formal operational level rather than the current 20%. Shayer and Adey
have shown that 70% can be achieved, so it is not an impossible task.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX