I am an on-again-off-again reader of this list-serve, and I had a
question that you might be able to help.
I teach Physics to undergraduates (Physics majors and others) at UNCG,
and I have reached the conclusion that students have problems with
Physics because they do not know how to set up problems to the point
where they can do the math to solve the problem. Observations to
support this conclusions include: a) students who do well in the
Calculus course (upto and including ODE) do poorly in Physics coursed;
b) students remark -- "I could NEVER have take the problem given and
arrived at that equation"; c) the inordinate desire of students to
"find the magic formula", so that they can then plug and chug.
Is there some way to teach students how to read a word problem and then
set it up so that they can then apply the math to it? I don't remember
how I learned this, but I (and all my colleagues) seem to be rather good
at this.