Re: [Phys-l] teaching physics conceptually

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

In defense of Hewett he started doing this before PER.

But now that we have test of conceptual understanding he has never published
any results of such testing.  In addition the idea of showing his canned
lectures to students is anathema in the PER world.

So while he started the ball rolling in a sense, his methods are
conventional which means that he will get conventional gain.  His text does
have refutational passages, but refutational text by itself yields only
slightly higher gain compared to the large gain of IE.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX
> I'm glad I'm not the only person with that impression of Hewitt. I
> only used it once, but found that his "conceptual" explanations really
> didn't foster understanding. Rather, they encouraged the student to
> memorize the "conceptual" answer. In later versions since I used the
> book it might have changed its approach to math, but I found that he
> avoided even the simplest math in some cases, math that would have
> made the conceptual image clear. Instead, he went around the math and
> came up with his non-mathematical explanation that gave students the
> impression they should be able to do the same thing. Students became
> frustrated that they couldn't just "look at a situation" and figure
> out what was going on.