Those numbers probably are typical of articles written for profession=
al journals that are intended to be read by experts in the field. Th=
at probably is a good way to guarantee a very small audience.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
=46rom: Forum for Physics Educators on behalf of Richard Hake
Sent: Tue 11/1/2005 7:59 PM
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
Subject: Re: Fog Index
=20
In his Phys-L post of 1 Nov 2005 11:14:51-0600 titled "Fog Index,"
Brian Whatcott wrote [bracketed by lines "WWWWWW. . . ."]:
Sampling a few contributions to the [Phys-L] Stopping Distance thread
[this was happenstance, not editorial comment, by the way] gave these
values:
John Clement.....11.62
John Denker.......9.69
Rick Swanson......9.65
Rick Tarara......8.92
BC................8.81
Mark Shapiro......8.68
Me................7.26
Roger Haar........4.41
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
Texas John Clement responded:
"Ahhh, but what is [the Gunning Fog Index] for Dick Hake?
To find out, I entered the paragraph below bracketed by lines
"HHHHHH. . . ." from a recent post "Is Dewey-like Pedagogy Relatively
Successful? - Part 1" [Hake (2005)] into the online calculator of the
Gunning Fog Index:
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
A survey of pre/post test data using the Halloun-Hestenes Mechanics
Diagnostic test or more recent Force Concept Inventory is reported
for 62 introductory physics courses enrolling a total number of
students N =3D 6542. A consistent analysis over diverse student
populations in high schools, colleges, and universities is obtained
if a rough measure of the average effectiveness of a course in
promoting conceptual understanding is taken to be the average
normalized gain <g>. The latter is defined as the ratio of the actual
average gain (%<post> - %<pre>) to the maximum possible average gain
(100 - %<pre>). Fourteen "traditional" (T) courses (N =3D 2084) which
made little or no use of interactive-engagement (IE) methods achieved
an average gain <g>T-ave =3D 0.23 =B1 0.04 (std dev). In sharp contra=
st,
forty-eight courses (N =3D 4458) which made substantial use of IE
methods achieved an average gain <g>IE-ave =3D 0.48 =B1 0.14 (std dev=
),
almost two standard deviations of <g>IE-ave above that of the
traditional courses. . . .[see Bloom (1984)]. . . Results for 30 (N =
=3D
3259) of the above 62 courses on the problem-solving Mechanics
Baseline test of Hestenes-Wells imply that IE strategies enhance
problem-solving ability. The conceptual and problem-solving test
results strongly suggest that the classroom use of IE methods can
increase mechanics-course effectiveness well beyond that obtained in
traditional practice.
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
The online calculator determined that my Gunning Fog Index was 25.2.
As I understand it, that means that a student who is in the second
month of his her/his twenty-fifth grade year (5 years of post
graduate study) should be capable of reading the text I submitted for
analysis. The implication is that students below that level are
incapable of reading the above paragraph.
No wonder my stuff has had so little impact on American education!