John relies on an analogy with mmedical treatment, which is not
the subject of my inquiry. As I finally figured out in law school, an
analogy is a way of saying, "You're too dumb to understand my answer, so
I'll answer a question you can understand."
We've had a number of post-docs at Argonne who were educated in
the Soviet Union, under their system - whatever it was (some of their
textbooks are now available in English). These guys uniformly match with
the best.
John uses the term "working optimally". I'd like to know his
standard of "optimal". What is he striving to do, and why is that better
than what we've got?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Analogies have been shown by research to help students understand concepts.
Indeed analogies are helpers and there is plenty of research showing that.
The educational system is in the same state as medicine was before it
embraced science, so the medical analogy is quite appropriate. Education is
done by what people think works, rather than what research shows works.
Only experiments can reveal what is actually going on. We are still using
medieval methods to achieve 21st century education.
Optimal education is probably where each student can achieve the maximum
"learning" that they are capable of. Again there is this persistence in
equating the outliers with the quality of education. The best will rise to
the top no matter what the system is. And of course all countries pretty
much do the same things so it is no wonder that the results are fairly
similar, especially at the top. And again the evidence of Argonne is NOT
scientific evidence, it is anecdotal which is not allowed as medical
evidence. Anecdotal evidence is at best an indicator of what might be going
on, not evidence of what is actually going on. And of course the sample is
way too small to draw any valid conclustions. You can only draw the
conclusion from the Russian colleagues that they have some good scientists,
but why is another unresearched question.
We have a very dysfunctional education system which is founded on faulty
premises. The basic assumption is that knowledge is merely handed down,
while the psychology research shows that it must be constructed by each
student individually. So one must use a learning cycle approach, which the
standard lecture system is NOT. Incidentally a learning cycle approach also
raises the student ability as shown by a number of experiments. It is quite
clear from the work of Shayer and Adey that students are not working or
thinking at an optimal level. We do not know exactly how much of ability is
due to genes and how much to nurture, but we do know that it is possible to
raise students to higher levels of thinking and academic achievement. This
is laid out very well in their book "Really Raising Standards" which
provides research based evidence for their claims.
So if you don't like my analogies, fine, then give some research results to
justify your claim that conventional education works better than PER, or at
least as well. For my part I would cite numerous papers by Lawson, Karplus,
McDermott, Hestenes, Laws, Shayer, Adey, Mazur... All are available, and
there is an online APS journal of PER. They can be found easily with a
modern search engine.
What I see is the same type of reluctance to admit that there is problem and
that some solutions are at hand. This is exactly what happened when the
idea of cleanliness and antiseptics started coming into medicine. The
traditional doctors did not give up their prestigious blood stained coats,
and only their retirement allowed the new ideas to fully penetrate medicine.
What I see is that there is a basic paradigm being held which prevents one
from seeing the evidence. Einstein had the problem with QM so it is not
stupididity. This type of inability to change paradigms is what is
preventing us from "fixing" the K-12 educational system. I see this in
students all the time. They get stuck on one fixed idea and keep on
repeating it going round and round without considering that something
radically different is needed.
So the basic question is "Is the current system adequate, or does it need
change, and does PER improve it?" There is plenty of research showing no,
yes, yes to the three parts of that question. And anecdotal evidence is
used to convince people when they can't understand research based evidence.
The number of Nobelists is anecdotal.
On a lighter note, there was the scientist who ripped out his doorbell and
installed knocker because he wanted the Nobel prize.