Re: [Phys-l] Physics First Revisited

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

But the Chinese students scored around 80% on the FCI without any higher
thinking.  They had 5 years of spiraling, with no increase in thinking.  But
the ancillary material showed that an inquiry course did produce a
significant increase in thinking.  The same thing was shown by Lawson,
Renner, and Karplus a looong time ago.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> 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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