Re: [Phys-l] index of refraction

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

Unfortunately although some students may say "I get it", the research shows
that in general they don't.  Guided inquiry labs generally produce higher
gain.  The other effect of inquiry is that it promotes an increase in
student thinking ability.  The science article comparing Chinese and US
students showed that inquiry improves thinking.  The evidence was in the
ancillary materials.

Granted verification labs may produce better skill in doing labs, but they
do not promote transfer.  Michelle Perry has shown that teaching algorithms
on the front end KILLS transfer.  However inquiry promotes transfer.  The
work by Schwartz shows that you get transfer if students initially struggle
with the ideas without being told what to do.  They must do this in small
groups.  Then an algorithm can be presented.  He has demonstrated that 9th
grade students can outperform college students when you use properly
constructed guided inquiry.

Just practice promotes inflexible expertise.  Guided inquiry promotes
flexible expertise, and innovative thinking.

Actually I have many times heard students say "I get it", but subsequent
post-testing showed they didn't.

Incidentally Schwartz showed that either guided inquiry or standard teaching
were able to produce students who performed identically well on standard
conventional measures of learning.  But the guided inquiry produced students
who could transfer the knowledge to related tasks with different surface
features, and the standard instruction students could not.

Research on how well guided inquiry works has been around for several
decades, yet most teachers do not use it.  It goes back to Karplus and
Arons.  The research is continuing, and produces the same evidence, but also
stronger evidence because they are now testing for transfer.  Most physics
teachers complain that their students can't do math.  That is because it is
taught in a rigid non-inquiry fashion and as a result transfer is killed.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> While I agree with a lot of what you have said, I would like to make the
> case for "verification" labs (I don't call them experiments because they
> really aren't). Students learn about force components, centripetal force,
> conservation of momentum, etc., in class. but for many students, it
> doesn't become real for them until they set up forces on a force table,
> actually measure the tension in a string tied to a whirling mass, or
> follow the collision of steel balls or marbles. Some students need to "see
> it" to believe it. It's often in the middle of a "verification" lab that a
> student will say "Now I get it!".