Re: [Phys-l] Physics First Revisited

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

The best test I know of the ineffectiveness of more popular lectures was the
one done at AZ State where they gave the FCI at the end of the course.
There were 4 lecturors with completely different styles, but all of them had
identical FCI averages for their classes.  One of the interesting facts that
I have noted is that some of the teachers who get high FCI gains are
actually quite boring (low key?) to watch.  This was true of the originator
of the Modeling program.

I would say that it is a misunderstanding that PER is searching for "the
magic bullet".  There is a recognition that we are looking for things that
work better than the current system.  The FCI was merely the first standard
test, and as such served to convince many that they were not doing well
enough.  Since then others have questioned whether the FCI is the best
measure.  But now there are other tests.  McDermott never used the FCI, but
rather her own tests.  A number of different methods have evolved all of
which show better results.  Some groups such as the U.Mass Amherst group
have combined methods in their materials.  There are also comparisons
involving different types of students.  And on the average they learn more.
Actually PER is looking for the processes that students need to go through
to have good learning, and then to engineer methods that promote those
processes.

The issue of learning styles is often expressed as visual, auditory...  But
this is only a factor when one is trying to recall.  The evidence is that
the students have to deal with multiple representations which to a certain
extent related to the "learning styles".  They have to have an internal
picture or model which must be visually, spatially represented, verbally
(written)...  All teachers except for possibly English teachers engage in
using different modalities of presentation.  Both the visual and the verbal
are used.  Science teachers also use kinesthetic which is used heavily in
Hake Socratic Dialog Labs, but also in the classic Brasell motion labs.
This has always been true, but the learning has been low until now.

So I submit that the learning style, and teaching style are red herrings.
The AZ State results showed that the teaching style had no effect on
conceptual understanding.  The learning style has the biggest effect on
factual recall, but until the students internalize and think about the
concepts, the conceptual understanding will be low.

Admittedly some of the things that you need to do to implement a research
based pedagogy requires a lot of work.  But once implemented, the work load
drops.  Also a number of teachers have commented that the newer method
energized them.  Whether this is permanent of course remains to be seen.
But the interaction between students and teachers is increased which makes
the class far more interesting.  There are certainly teachers who may not
like that.  But if you get interested in trying to figure out why students
say things, or what is going on in their minds, it is absolutely
factinating.  I find that this type of student interaction is much more
tiring than just giving a lecture and assigning homework.

Yes, all of us went through the conventional system where understanding was
won by slow degrees.  So citing that as a given is merely recapitulating our
experiences.  A very few individuals in physics classes ever do the
necessary thinking, and that was true when I was young.  I remember vividly
how a number of students would try to memorize Hi/H0=Di/Do as hi ho di do
phrase, rather than visualizing using proportional reasoning.  These
students had poor proportional reasoning so they could not build a mental
model based on some simple physical ideas.  PER and in general science
education is trying to get teachers to teach so that students build the
mental models rather than relying on jingles for temporary memorization.
There is now a move afoot to infuse PER curricula with activites that build
better thinking.  We are all survivors of the conventional system!!!

This latter effort to improve thinking has been shown to be vital by the
recent SCIENCE magazine article.  It showed that Chinese students came into
a calculus based course with much higher FCI scores than US students, but no
higher thinking skills.  Chinese students have 5 years of physics before
they get to college, vs the 0-2.5 years of US students.  "Learning
scientific Reasoning" Bao
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/323/5914/586>
Or from the author (click on word PDF)
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~lbao/Publications.htm
So getting students to do conventional physics things may have very little
effect on their ability to think.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> Very theatrical teachers can be wildly popular on campus, inducing
> students from all disciplines to attend these classes just for the
> theatrics, but I question whether much learning takes place in most
> of them.
>
> As an aside, one of the things that has bothered me about most PER is
> an assumption made tacitly by many in that field that if we can just
> find the "magic bullet" all the students will learn everything the
> first time around and the world will be revolutionized. I
> overstating, of course, but I have heard similar sentiments expressed
> by several of the notables in the field, and others to whom I have
> mentioned my impression have agreed with me to some extent. I think
> this ignores the issue of teaching and learning styles,
> well-documented by the Myers-Briggs test analyses, and may be one of
> the reasons so many well-intentioned pedagogical schemes have not
> outlasted the lives of the principal promoters of them. There are
> certainly other reasons, among them the fact that almost all the new
> methods are highly labor-intensive, either demanding large amounts of
> pre-class preparation (I've heard more than one teacher, while
> touting their favorite PER pedagogy, say it helps to be a workaholic)
> or require a great deal of one-on-one or few-on-one contact between
> student(s) and teacher, thus either increasing the teacher workload
> greatly or requiring class sizes to be drastically reduced, one not
> very attractive to the teachers and the other not very attractive to
> the administrators.