[Phys-L] Re: Has Scholarship Been Reconsidered?

[rrhake at EARTHLINK.NET (Richard Hake)]

Subscribers to Phys-L,

You may or may not be interested in my recent post:

Hake, R.R. 2005.  "Re: Has Scholarship Been Reconsidered? #2" AERA-L post of
  6 Oct 2005 13:25:42-0700; online at
<http://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0510&L=aera-l&T=0&O=D&X=4513FE4DF701048CB0&Y=rrhake%40earthlink.net&P=967>,
or (for the convenience of those whose mail systems do not preserve
hot-linking of long URL's across line breaks)
<http://tinyurl.com/95z3b> - courtesy <http://tinyurl.com/create.php>.

If your interest in "Has Scholarship Been Reconsidered?" is:

(a) zero or less, please hit DELETE;

(b) only slightly greater than zero, please scan the ABSTRACT in the APPENDIX;

(c) substantially greater than zero, please click on
<http://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0510&L=aera-l&T=0&O=D&X=4513FE4DF701048CB0&Y=rrhake%40earthlink.net&P=967>
or <http://tinyurl.com/95z3b> so as to scan the entire 34kB post.

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
<rrhake@earthlink.net>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi>


XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
APPENDIX [Abstract of Hake (2005)]
ABSTRACT: AERA-J's Michael Lamport Commons posed the question: "How
can one evaluate teaching effectiveness in higher education without
making direct comparison with other faculty." A method currently
employed in introductory physics education is to:

(1) employ valid and consistently reliably multiple-choice (MC) diagnostic
tests of conceptual understanding that can be administered to
thousands of students in hundreds of courses world wide, and

(2) compare the resultant pre/post test *normalized gains* with those
from other courses.

Among the factors that discourage such evaluation in higher education are:

(a) the failure of many university administrators and
promotion/tenure committees to reconsider the meaning of
"scholarship";

(b) over reliance on various *indirect* (and therefore problematic)
gauges of student *higher-order* learning;

(c) the common misconception that MC tests cannot measure higher-level
cognitive processes,

(d) the pre/post paranoia of many psychologists, pychometricians, and
education specialists;

(e) failure to appreciate the value of the half-century-old
"normalized gain" for comparison of average pre/post test gains for
different courses having a broad range of average pretest scores, and

(f) ignorance of, or dismissal of, the lessons of the
physics-education reform effort.