Re: [Phys-l] Lecture Isn't Effective: More Evidence #2

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

I read all the time accounts of how students become more independent in
Modeling classes.  But this needs to be published in journals.  If it can be
independently verified or shown through testing, maybe some people would pay
attention to this and decide to switch.  The most powerful evidence would be
to see if the students do better in subsequent courses independently of the
teachers.  In other words is there cognitive acceleration associated with
PER?

I obviously consider conventional lecture to be a form of spoon feeding,
with low results.  Most of the information ends up under the high chair.  It
also reinforces the idea that students have to wait to be told things by
authority rather than taking initiative to learn on their own.  Actually
they learn things like lyrics to popular songs on their own, so this
paradigm is basically a school trained paradigm.  I suspect that the high
achievers who end up as Nobel Laureates somehow managed to escape from this
paradigm.  They are the exceptions to the rule and achieve despite the
school system.

But if you spoon feed enough some things do get through, especially if this
is done for several years as it is with the Chinese.  But because both US
and Chinese systems rely on spoon feeding, the students do not develop
thinking skills.  Actually the US system is not as restrictive as the
Chinese model, so many in the Orient think we develop better independent
thinking.  The real challenge is to develop independent skilled thinking.
That is where I see PER as nibbling at this problem.  The Chinese develop
rigid experts and we develop flexible independent thinkers.  The countries
that succeed in developing more flexible experts may end up on the top.  The
history of our country has been that the ideas developed here have been
taken up by countries like Japan with stunning results.  They took up our
industrial ideas and applied them when we were stuck in the old methods.
The result is obvious.  I think they may take up PER and allied educational
ideas and as a result end up not just somewhat better, but astoundingly
better at developing innovative things.  But to do this they have to change
their very rigid paradigm of teaching, and as we know teachers are
conservative and tend to teach as they were taught.

But unfortunately I see the current educational push as making students even
more passive.  And I now have testimonies from math teachers that requiring
4 years of HS math has forced the teachers to dumb down the algebra II and
pre cal classes because they are not allowed to fail a high percentage of
students.  This may happen to physics courses in TX because they are not
required to have 4 years of science.  Remember the college and senior level
HS teachers are at the end of a pipeline that has taught students to be
passive learners rather than active learners.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> > As to whether they are more self directed, that is 
> certainly a good point to
> > investigate.  The accounts of Chinese learning would 
> indicate that the
> > Chinese tend to want external authority rather than 
> internal thinking.  One
> > can readily see that students often want you to tell them 
> the answers rather
> > than seeking them on their own, so the current educational 
> system is driving
> > them into novice like attitudes.
>
> This is very true. Some students want teachers to tell them the  
> answers instead of thinking on their own. They want to learn as fast  
> as they can; inquiry method can be perceived as a waste of time!  
> Perhaps, more students will prefer instant learning; just like some  
> prefer instant coffee and fast food or "very fast food". I have  
> encountered a student who complaint about his physics teacher not  
> telling the answer sooner enough, thus wasting his time. 
> (This student  
> achieved a silver medal in International Physics Olympiad; but he  
> seems to focus more in "mathematical physics" than "conceptual  
> physics.")