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Re: [Phys-L] kinematics objectives

Here is a misconception about the pedagogy. Nobody goes around whacking one
individual misconception at a time. Essentially it is done by eliciting the
students own misconceptions and then confronting and resolving them. But
the students do the resolution, but the tasks are setup so as to confront
them. This is the McDermott method. Mazur does something similar, but he
provides a multiple choice of possible answers. And each answer may be
multiple misconceptions. But the students in discussion resolve the
misconceptions. Modeling builds coherent models, but the students have to
present the problems and question each other. Essentially the
misconceptions come out during student interactions. Modeling also has
exploration first so students gain experience with the concepts (models).
Real Time Physics and Workshop Physics asks explicit questions which are
answered by each group, so again misconceptions are treated by some form of
peer instruction. The ILDs actually bring out individual misconceptions but
they are treated as a group. Actually the instructor should mention some
common specific misconceptions and include them in the predictions if the
students are afraid to voice them.

My point about Whitehead is that his philosophy of emphasizing algorithms
has been the big gorilla in the tent. By emphasizing that over cognition,
students learn methods, but don't understand them, and can't apply them.
Schwartz's research shows that when you just emphasize algorithms you can
get experts, but they are very inflexible. If you just emphasize
exploration you get innovate, but annoying experts who are off the wall. So
exploration comes first, then algorithms are introduced as needed later.
Notice this is not the JD philosophy of telling students the truth.

Essentially the standard teaching methods ignore the problems and assume
that you can just tell students and they will then go out and learn. But
when proportional reasoning is absent, they can't understand algebra. It is
rather like the movie Murder by Death in which Alec Guiness plays a blind
butler who gives verbal instructions to the cook. But she is deaf and dumb
and presents him with written messages.

Chunking applies to both math and physics, and is certainly not unique to
one or the other. It also applies to English, history, music...

As to numbers, the research based innovations produce superior numbers on
the evaluations. But this type of thing is still in its youth, so more
needs to be considered. The FCI is a start, but certainly not the end.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 07:02:27PM -0500, John Clement wrote:
But if you make concepts the core, and then bring in methods
afterwards, the students can learn efficient problem
solving. I would
strongly disagree with the idea that thought is brought in
afterwards.
That is the currently conventional approach to math and it is not
working well. Whitehead might have changed his mind if he saw the
research that we have now.

I imagined that he was referering to something like "chunking" [1].
After reading Mahajan and Hake on Benezet-Berman [2], I think

"algorithms" = abstract math (2x = 4, solve for x)
"concepts" = science (force * mass = acceration, where
"force" is .)

Although even for "abstract math", you need to have a
conceptual grasp of multiplication, equality, variables,
commutativity, .. I see students thrashing about hoping to
stumble on a solution, and this thrashing occurs because they
don't have a good grasp of *something*, but the thing they're
missing runs the gamut from 'multiplication' to 'moment of
inertia'. I doubt categorizing these misconceptions in a
hierarchy of concept importance is particularly useful, but I
don't have numbers to back that up.

Cheers,
Trevor

[1]:
http://www.csun.edu/science/ref/reasoning/how-students-learn/2.html
[2]: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512202v1

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