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Priscilla Laws commented that their students hardly crack open the_______________________________________________
text, so the problem is not unique. Indeed in the stone age when I
went to school that was also a problem.
One comment was made that the PER methods are designed to get student
to do in class what they used to do outside of class. This is
slightly incorrect. It gets them to do in class what they SHOULD do
outside of class. There is no evidence that they ever did it outside
of class. Feynman complained about lack of student understanding long
before the FCI was developed. Some PER methods, notably Mazur's,
requires students to come into class after having read the text. He
enforces it with a short reading quiz every lecture.
The real difficulty that students have is that they don't know how to
think about things, so they need the sort of guidance provided by the
PER curricula.
John M. Clement
Houston, TX
Even w/ a free text some won't read it. The last week of my ten
week
stint teaching Chem. at North High several of my "A" students
admitted
they never opened the text except to do the assigned chapter end
problems. They said they got all they needed from my lectures. A
left
handed compliment on my teaching?
bc, if he had the chance would now minimize the "direct" method
Spagna Jr., George wrote:
Bernard asks
p.s. George, did you readopt a text because their grades plummeted?
And Joel adds
Or because you got tired of listening to the complaints on studentevaluations?
Or, what was the reason?
It's a bit more complicated - top grades slipped a little, and more
students "fell off" the bottom of the distribution. More
importantly,
it became clear that by not using a set textbook we were apparently
cut