Re: [Phys-l] Strong Students

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

There have been studies which show that gain occurs at all levels, but there
has not to my knowledge been any specifically targeting the top students.  I
do have anecdotal evidence from looking at my top students, but this does
not constitute evidence of what is really going on, but only evidence of
what might happen.  PER has concentrated on the bottom students mainly
because it was easier to make changes there.  It is much more difficult to
change the higher level courses because the resistance to doing this is much
higher.  Other departments will even call the physics professors
unprofessional when they make radical changes to required courses.
Personally I would consider the other departments unprofessional when they
make such statements.

The big problem of course as has been alluded to is the necessity of
changing the learning paradigms of students.  When that happens, presumably,
they will study on their own and not cheat.  The reference to proofs came
from the research of Redish who devised an "attititude" test (MPEX) which
measured the learning paradigms of students.  It was calibrated by looking
at the attitudes of the experts in the field of physics.  The result of the
study was that the learning attitudes went down after conventional physics
courses, but showed improvement after studio style courses such as Workshop
Physics.  The proofs question was one of the more interesting ones on the
MPEX.  Students showed novice attitudes when they regarded proofs as telling
you it was OK to use the equations, and displayed more expert like attitudes
when they regarded proofs as providing important connections between ideas.
Another attitudinal test the VOSS, similar to the MPEX, is a good predictor
of gain in physics courses.

Unfortunately math puts great emphasis on proofs in HS when there is some
very firm evidence that they do not work well in helping students.  Proofs
in math really require the ability to do formal reasoning or propositional
logic.  Less than 10% of graduating seniors in HS have this ability
according to tests done by Lawson.  Piaget thought that formal reasoning
increased with the understanding of the Piagetian tasks hence the name
formal operational, but this is not really true.  It increases more slowly
than other types of reasoning.  Lawson has also shown that other types of
reasoning are generally used, and that propositional logic is not that
useful.

There is also evidence that the ability to actually use propositional logic
does not increase much even when it is taught explicitly.  The propositional
logic test (PLT) shows no rise when students take a course in computer
science.  One would think that CS would increase this logical ability.

For some reason that we do not know, we surmounted most of the obstacles to
learning physics.  In the past only a small percentage did this, and this
has not changed measurably.  We now know that the brain is very malleable
and learning can happen at a variety of ages.  We still create new neurons
even in our old age.  The ability to think is learned as a response to
factors in the child's environment, and also requires some automatic neural
growth.  My point is that we could be educating a much larger percentage to
be thinkers than we are doing now.  But the Chinese/US study shows that the
"rigorous" HS physics curriculum probably does not do this.  We need to be
doing the types of things that put the student into an environment where
their thinking increases.  BTW we know that neurons are still created in old
age because they did an experiment on consenting terminal patients where
they injected a dye that is only taken up by dividing cells.  A subsequent
autopsy showed that even 80 year olds had this dye in their brains.

The standard rationale for algebra and physics always involves the idea that
it teaches you to think.  The evidence for this is very negative.  So we
need to face up to this reality and do things that fulfill this promise.
The strong students tend to take care of themselves no matter what.  We can
not change society, but we can change our teaching methods.  The standard
didactic methods do not really change paradigms, or attitudes.  There is a
lot of evidence from psychology that you can change the way peoples brains
function.  For example cognitive therapy can produce the same types of
changes in the brain as drugs for OCD individuals.  The same result was also
found for depressed individuals.  Some of the same types of things done in
PER are done in cognitive therapy.  But in both cases the patient has to do
a lot of the work, and it is not spoon fed to them.

As to our difference from students.  We are different in that we see what is
in books in a very different fashion from the students.  But we are similar
in that we tend to cling to set paradigms of learning.  Students have been
trained ever since grade school to accept and parrot back things told to
them by authority, whether it makes sense or not.  Ask any student to
explain why invert and multiply works with dividing fractions, and you will
seldom get an answer.  Then if you don't get an answer ask them to make up a
word problem for dividing 6 by 1/2.  They will often tell you that the
answer is 3, but if they can make up a word problem to go with this they can
easily visualize what they had to do to get the answer.  Unfortunately we
have students at the end of the pipeline that is training them the wrong
way, so breaking them of counterproductive ways of thinking about learning
is very difficult.  They are capable, but they have not been properly
challenged by brain compatible teaching.


John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> This discussion about textbooks has me wondering ... much of PER seems
> to focus on statistical measures of improvement, such as they are.
> There seems to be a sense of developing strategies that effectively
> reach the middle and the bottom.   The experience of the very best
> students, however, I have never seen singled out.    We are
> instructed, for example, that what WE (by which I mean folks who end
> up going into this sort of thing for a living) would have wanted as
> students is not relevant information, because we are, in some sense or
> other, outliers.
>
> I think of this often because I am virtually the opposite of what I'm
> constantly reading is "typical" of students in physics courses.
> (Frankly, sometimes a lot of this sounds like so much intellectual
> snobbery, but that's a discussion for another day.)   A recent example
> was how the "typical student"  regards proofs in class and/or textbooks.
>
> Anyway, the point of my question is this: has there been much study of
> how well students at the top are served by PER-based methodologies?
>
>
> David Craig
>
>
> <http://web.lemoyne.edu/~craigda/>
>
>
>
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