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The 'different curricula' can amount to 'teaching to the test' in
subtle (or overt) ways. The FCI requires a pretty deep understanding
of Newton's Laws although Master's and PhD level physicists mostly
find it trivial. A standard curriculum/book spends a week at best on
this topic. Any curriculum that spends more time and more focus is
teaching _more_ to the test than a more traditional one. The
Thornton test, as I recall, has a lot of graphical analysis built in
(which graph describes the given motion type of question). I would
think that as a pre-test many students would find that KIND of
question unfamiliar and therefore do badly..partly due to there lack
of experience with such. Now if the curriculum in question actually
spends considerable time with this kind of analysis (and I'm not
saying it shouldn't) then post-test gains could be expected to be
high. In both cases the content may be quite different from a
traditional course. OK--students do better so maybe the different
content course is better.....but, my concern is for what is NOT
covered in order to spend the additional time and effort in certain
content areas. [Yes the old breadth versus depth debate, but we do
pass some of these students on to the next course where there might
be expectations of coverage (engineering programs for example).]
The FCI requires a pretty deep understanding
of Newton's Laws although Master's and PhD level physicists mostly
find it trivial.