John Clement wrote, in part:
"But there is evidence that when the historical approach is used, the
students can gain a higher level of understanding. There was a paper in
AJP where a class in Australia did this. As I recall the subject was
optics. It is very clear that the standard presentation does not work
extremely well, and that there are other research based methods that
work much better. There are few papers on the efficacy of a historical
approach, but the one mentioned is significant."
I wish that John would cite references.
Is he talking about Galili & Hazan (2000)? They were at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, not Australia.
Daniel Crowe
Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics
Ardmore Regional Center
dcrowe@sotc.org
Reference:
Galili, Igal & Amnon Hazan (2000) "The influence of an historically
oriented course on students' content knowledge in optics evaluated by
means of facets-schemes analysis" AJP 68(7)S3-S15.
[Note: This is in the PER supplement to the July issue.]