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Re: [Phys-L] Indicators of quality teaching : some necessities



I think everyone agrees that long term studies of what happens after a PER
course is desirable. But...

I keep on saying put your money where your mouth is. If you think that your
evaluations are good and that your teaching is good, try the FCI and see
what sort of gain you get. Then report the results good, or bad. If you
think your students get the concepts and they do poorly on the FCI, that is
a wake up call. But until one has experience the effect of teaching on the
FCI or FMCE they really do not understand how poorly their students may be
doing.

It is an experimental science. And point 4 is purely an opinion. So why
not test it???

As to long term studies would anyone who can get grant money be willing to
do one? There was one on the FCI reported in the Physics Teacher which
showed that scores were stable up to 3 years later, in great contrast to
most testing. But that does not show whether or not there is a positive
effect later.

Shayer & Adey with their program which resembles PER found little immediate
effect, but a fairly large delayed effect. And some researchers have shown
a slight increase in physics majors as I recall. So there is evidence that
PER like teaching has valuable effects beyond just FCI gain. Several people
including me have shown that there is also gain on the Lawson test which JD
snubbs, but has never tried with students. Mazur has shown gain in problem
solving ability, but that is being ignored by JD. The Hellers show both
gain in problem solving and on the FCI. Redish has shown that attitudes
towards learning increase in PER studio style courses using the MPEX
evaluation, so again PER shows other types of gain. So it is probable that
the teaching driven by the FCI has had some good effects, but are there
other effects that also need to be optimized. Certainly, but we need tests
for them.

Again people who have never tried the FCI to see their gain, really do not
understand it. You can look a physical system, and try to figure out what
it does, but until you experiment and measure it, you don't know if it works
differently than what you thought. The same is very true of psychology. I
just read an interesting article about suicide. Contrary to what people
would think that it peaks in winter, it does just the opposite. It peaks in
spring and has a strong dip in winter. This data goes back to the 1800s in
Switzerland and is well known by European psychologists. So what you might
think is true can be confounded by reality.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


4) It is a one-sided test: A low score is a reliable
indicator of lousy teaching, but a high score is not a
reliable indicator of quality teaching, because the test
is too simple. The gains that people brag about are so
low as to prove that the students do not understand
"conceptual physics". If they understood the fundamental
concepts, they would score much higher.