[Phys-L] lifelong learning ... action items

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 06/29/2013 06:31 PM, Richard Tarara wrote in part:
> The point here is that the skills for LIFELONG LEARNING are really
> what are the key things to take from a formal education.

IMHO that's true and important.

By way of follow-up, let's see what that means in practice.

In most places, to get a teaching certificate, you need something like 
30 semester-hours of "education" classes.  In other words, if you want
to teach high-school physics, you basically have to double major in
physics plus educational psychology.  So far so good.

Now, what about the other 99.9 percent of the population, the ones who
don't have teaching certificates?  You could easily get a bachelor's, 
master's, and PhD in science or history or /lots/ of other fields, 
without knowing the first thing about learning theory ... e.g. without 
ever having heard the words "building-block approach" or "spiral 
approach" or anything like that.

We would like all these people to engage in lifelong learning.  Why
should we expect them to do that, when we have done so very little
to train them how to do it?

Here's a possibly-helpful analogy:  There is a trendy program called
"writing across the curriculum" which starts from the premise that
writing is super-important.  It requires every class -- including science
class -- to give writing assignments, and to grade the quality of the
writing.

So, here's an obvious suggestion:  Lifelong learning across the curriculum.
That is, every class -- including science class -- should overtly and
explicitly teach how to learn, how to remember stuff properly, and how
to think.  This sounds so obvious that you would think everybody would
already do it, but tell me, does the physics text you are using even
once mention the words "building block approach" or "spiral approach"?

For the people on this list, disassembling a complex task into simple 
building blocks, learning the blocks, and then putting everything 
back together is absolutely routine.  We do it for a living.  HOWEVER,
most other people aren't very good at it.  In school, almost all the 
problems are already disassembled before the students see them.

I believe in helping the students ... but there is such a thing as 
helping too much, if it makes them dependent.  Teaching them to
fish is helpful in the best sense; giving them pre-cooked Fish 
McNuggets not so much.

Specifically:  I've seen lots of exam questions where the goal is
to calculate such-and-such quantity.  The problem has seven parts,
a, b, c, d, e, f, and g.  In other words, a step-by-step procedure
is spelled out.  At this point I ask the instructor, why not just 
ask them to calculate such-and-such, period, as an open-ended 
question, and let them decide what steps to use?  The reply is
always that it would make the exam too difficult.

I'm usually too polite to ask the obvious follow-up question, but
I would very much like to ask:  What's the point?  What's the point
of teaching them to follow a step-by-step procedure, rather than
teaching them to think?

Real-world problems that arrive at my desk are very seldom accompanied
by a step-by-step outline of the solution.

There are a lot of standard tricks for attacking big scary open-
ended problems.  There are a lot of standard educational methods
that could be applied to lifelong learning.  Why are we not more
explicitly, systematically, and emphatically teaching these things?