Some physicists may be interested in "Re: The Burden of Proof #2"
[Hake (2009)]. The abstract reads:
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ABSTRACT: Kevin Carey in his post "The Burden of Proof," quoted
portions of Paul Basken's (2009) report "Engineering Schools Prove
Slow to Change" on a Carnegie Foundation study that bemoans "a
faculty culture resistant to change." Carey objects to blaming the
slowness of change in engineering schools on "culture" because, in
his view, "the more autonomy faculty are given in the classroom, the
greater the burden of proof to demonstrate that their choices are
*actually working*, with that proof being based, in significant part,
on some evidence of what students learn."
But the problem is that most faculty fail to discharge their burden
of proof of student learning because they (and administrators) are
immersed in a culture that relies on course exams and Student
Evaluations of Teaching (SET's) to gauge student learning - both of
which typically measure lower-level educational objectives such as
memory of facts and definitions rather than higher-level outcomes
such as critical thinking and non-algorithmic problem solving.
How then can faculty measure their students' higher-level learning
from start to finish of a course? As demonstrated by the physics
education reform effort, by direct formative evaluation of students'
*domain-specific* learning through pre/post testing using: (a) valid
and consistently reliable tests of conceptual understanding *devised
by disciplinary experts,* and (b) traditional courses as controls.
Such definitive evaluation of the cognitive impact of courses has:
(a) increased student learning in some U.S. introductory physics
courses (including large enrollment classes at California Polytechnic
at San Luis Obispo, Harvard, MIT, North Carolina State, and the
University of Colorado); (b) is gradually gaining a foothold in
introductory astronomy, biology, chemistry, economics, engineering,
geoscience, and math; and (c) has the potential to gradually enhance
the effectiveness of higher education generally, including that in
engineering.
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