Re: [Phys-l] Principle of prerequisites

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

But where is the research showing its effectiveness?  I looked and didn't
find any.

Currently the idea of starting from simple to advanced topics is absolutely
what our current system does.  Mastery is tested using various evaluations
by teachers and the state.  So why is math and science not being learned
well by the majority of students?

The problem is in the didactive nature of most teaching top down.  Students
need to have exploration where they invent ideas.  This needs to be done
before any didactic algorithm introduction.  And the best way is to have the
students show each other their invented algorithms.

Yes learning can and should be pleasurable, but when it is introduced in the
extremely didactic methods used in most schools, it becomes drudgery.
Students decide that thinking is hard, boring, and painful.  Unfortunately
the hard and sometimes painful parts are quite true, but the boring doesn't
have to be.

I suspect that Khan Academy my work for the type of students like us, but
not for the majority.  The nerds may lap it up.  But didactic methods are
very ineffective in teaching proportional reasoning, conservation reasoning,
statistical reasoning.  You can teach the mechanics, but then it never seems
to transfer for most students, except for a very few at the top.

Looking at the first lecture on physics they immediately raised a red flag
by saying that the ideas "were pretty intuitive".  Actually for non
Newtonian, non Galilean thinkers they are counterintuitive.  Two weeks after
the lecture many students will remember their misconceptions and even claim
the misconcepted ideas were expressed in the lecture.  Mazur shows this in
his video on the YouTube.  This has been shown by the research any number of
times.  Students have to engage in measuring, making graphs, motion maps...
So have they looked at the research and done research based testing?  There
were no indication on the web site that this had been done.

So if teachers use this material, all they are doing is substituting a web
lecture for their own lecture.  But in their own lecture they could use
concep questions ala Mazur to check and solidify understanding.  This type
of thing will perpetuate bad practices, so I can not recommend it to
teachers.  I might recommend it to nerdy students who wish to learn more.  I
might recommend it to students who are so dyslexic that they can't read
textbooks.  There are some students for whom reading is a cognitive task so
they can't understand what they are reading.  Some of them can read out loud
and tape the passages.  They then understand the reading when they play it
back because listening is not for them a cognitive task.  If you don't
understand what I have just said, I recommend "How Difficult Can this Be" a
FAT City workshop which clearly explains various cognitive problems.  So
these lectures might benefit students who will never be able to read.  But
interactive engagement would work even better.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> http://www.khanacademy.org/
>
>
> The most important message of the video can probably be described as
> follows: do not move to more advanced topics before being sure that
> less advanced topics have been learned by students, at least
> partially. Call this the POP (Principle Of Prerequisites).
>
> In my opinion, learning SHOULD and CAN BE pleasurable. How can this be
> achieved? By rigorously applying POP. Unfortunately, students are
> often deprived of the pleasure of learning by  grade inflation.