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Re: [Phys-L] intuitive versus counter-intuitive



What about the people (and cats?) with photographic memories?
On Feb 11, 2015 6:51 PM, "John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org> wrote:

Nonsense!!! Mazur and Crouch showed that demos are better remembered if
the
student does a prediction just before seeing the results. Then if there is
a discussion of why the results happened, not just a lecture, the memory is
reinforced. The demo must be shown immediately after the prediction as
found by the creators of the ILDs. This same effect was found by Heather
Brasell in her seminal experiments with the sonic ranger.

It is natural for people to cling to their existign paradigm and then
misremember results. It is not the demo, it is how the demo is set up with
respect to the students. They must be part of it by prediction and
discussion.

Of course the original post was how memory is malleable and can be
falsified. This happens every day to everyone. People believe that memory
is like a recording device and is permanent, but it is quite the opposite.
Whenever you recall a memory is stored back and in the process it changes.
So if you embellish it just a little each time, it will change and become
quite different from the actual event.

Incidentally gee-whiz demos are often remembered clearly, but the point of
them is then totally lost.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX



On 02/11/2015 01:26 PM, Paul Nord wrote:
I blame the demos. We design too many physics demos to be
very clever
and give counter-intuitive results.

I agree ... and it's not just the demos. In many textbooks,
the section on relativity seems to revel in making it seem as
unfamiliar, weird, and counter-intuitive as possible ...
even though the vast majority of what relativity predicts is
perfectly familiar and non-weird.
https://www.av8n.com/physics/spacetime-welcome.htm

This is what I might call David Copperfield mode:
"Hey, pay me money and I'll show you this amazing and
unbelievable thing."
That makes for entertainment, but it doesn't make for good pedagogy.

On the other hand ... this is not a clear-cut black-and-white
issue. There are arguments both ways:
a) Students who have never seen the ordinary case need
to see that and become reasonably familiar with it
before moving on to the extraordinary case.
b) Step (a) must not be taken too far, because students
have a tendency to over-generalize. They leap to the
conclusion that the ordinary case is the universal case.
There is even a word that covers this: sophomoric.

In this department, as in so many others, teaching is more of
an art than a science.
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_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
Phys-l@www.phys-l.org
http://www.phys-l.org/mailman/listinfo/phys-l