Mr. Hake I think you made some great points in your rebuttal of McCarty's points and it gave me a lot to think about. I was particularly struck by two points that you made. The first was your opinion of teaching to the test, a statement that has, in the past been given a very bad connotation. It can be a good thing as stated,
“Of course if "teaching to the test" means giving students some
understanding of the basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics”
The ‘test’ is suppose to be an indicator of how much a student understands so if we are providing a valid assessment at the end of a unit, our teaching really should be ‘to the test’.
The second point that was made that I’ve started to see more with my kids this year was that problem solving skills does not necessarily mean conceptual understanding,
“Many traditional physics instructors think that introductory physics
courses should focus on the "skill" of *problem solving.* They assign
vast numbers of back-of-chapter problems and devote lectures and
"recitations" to going over problem solutions. Sorry guys, pre/post
testing demonstrates that "Students do not overcome conceptual
difficulties after solving 1000 traditional problems" [Kim & Pak
(2002)].”
In the past I have spent a lot of time on practice problems in class and going over homework problems in class. When I started teaching physics I thought that if the kids were able to do the math and use the equations that they would be able to understand/explain the concepts themselves. I spent a lot of time focusing on problem solving strategies and at the end of the day I found that while they were good at solving problems similar to what we had done in class, when they were presented with situations in which they needed to show actual understanding, rather than plugging and chugging, they were significantly less successful than I had hoped.
This year I have tried to spend more time on making sure the kids actually understand what is happening before loading them up with problems to solve. While I am trying to keep it from becoming a ‘conceptual physics’ class I have also been working to make it more accessible to more kids. While I haven’t had as much time to spend on going over solutions and teaching problem solving skills, they seem to be understanding the concepts much better and are actually still doing well with the mathematical aspect. They are able to adapt what they are learning to multiple situations, not just the specific ones that they have been presented with in class.