Re: Setting up problems

[Joseph Bellina <jbellina@SAINTMARYS.EDU>]

This is a very common problem.  Do you know if your students understand
the concepts in the problems well enough to be able to interpret them.
Do you do any work to support developing problem solving skills?  The
first thing that comes to my are the ALPS sheets, or newer computer
versions.
There is a sense in which the normal style of the physics curriculum
trains students to hunt plug and chug, because the first material is
generally kinematics in which students can be very successful doing
that.  Of course being successful there, they assume it will work
everywhere else.  The Hellers at Minnesota have developed context rich
problems that are worked in groups, as a way to get students thinking.

Of course most students think learning is memorizing, so in this context
that means memorizing the equations and then hunting for the right one.
I think you have to actively work against this...at your own risk, since
they will not know what to do if they can't memorize, and may complain
to parents or administrators.

There is on simple solution or magic bullet.  It is a complex problem.
Hopefully you will get lots of ideas from the list.

Good luck with it.

joe

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003,
Promod Pratap wrote:

> 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.
>
> Promod Pratap

Joseph J. Bellina, Jr.               574-284-4662
Associate Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556