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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 betterremembered
if the student does a prediction just before seeing theresults. Then
if there is a discussion of why the results happened, not just aimmediately
lecture, the memory is reinforced. The demo must be shown
after the prediction as found by the creators of the ILDs.This same
effect was found by Heather Brasell in her seminal experiments withparadigm and then
the sonic ranger.
It is natural for people to cling to their existign
misremember results. It is not the demo, it is how thedemo is set up
with respect to the students. They must be part of it byprediction
and discussion.believe that
Of course the original post was how memory is malleable and can be
falsified. This happens every day to everyone. People
memory is like a recording device and is permanent, but itis quite the opposite.
Whenever you recall a memory is stored back and in theprocess it changes.
So if you embellish it just a little each time, it will change andgood pedagogy.
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 bevery 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
black-and-white issue.
On the other hand ... this is not a clear-cut
more of an artThere 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
_______________________________________________than a science.
_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
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http://www.phys-l.org/mailman/listinfo/phys-l
_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
Phys-l@www.phys-l.org
http://www.phys-l.org/mailman/listinfo/phys-l
Forum for Physics Educators
Phys-l@www.phys-l.org
http://www.phys-l.org/mailman/listinfo/phys-l