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Re: [Phys-l] Physics First Revisited



At 12:30 -0600 2/6/09, John Clement wrote:

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.

This doesn't surprise me. Just doing the same old-same old over and over again isn't going to make better thinkers of students. But using a spiral approach should have some advantages if it is done in the context of improving thinking skills. If, each time a topic is revisited, it is done at a higher intellectual level, and is used to enhance thinking skills at the same time, then the students having more exposure to physics should also have higher thinking skills, which should enable the later efforts to be accelerated. But thinking skills aren't the only things that need to be emphasized. Most high school students have no idea how to read a textbook, so reading assignments, even if religiously followed by the students will usually have little if any effect on them. All they have ever been taught is how to read stories, but textbooks are not storybooks and they need to know the difference and know that it requires more work to read a textbook (which is why, textbook reading assignments should be shorter than comparable literature reading assignments). Most students have no understanding of this distinction, and so complain that they can't understand the book when they have been trying to read it as if it were a novel. Not being a teacher of reading, I really don't have any tested ideas about how to teach students this distinction, although I have a few half-baked ideas. But this distinction needs to be brought out early, however it needs to be done, so that students when they get to the point where it really matters what they can get from the text, will be able to shift from novel-reading to textbook-reading. Do this should help with their thinking skills as well, although I have no evidence to verify this thought.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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