Re: The Soapbox

["B. Esser" <besser@creighton.edu>]

On Thu, 18 Apr 1996 dykstrad@varney.idbsu.edu wrote:

> With respect to Joel Rauber's comments along these lines, on the few
> occasions that I have ever looked for any connections with having had high
> school physics, I have not found any corelations with performance in
> college physics.  So if there are any found, they are apparently not
> universal.


My spouse who is a physician teaches her medical students that if you do 
not take a temperature you will never have a patient with a fever.  Don't 
look through the journals and you can conclude that connections do not 
exist. 

A quote from the Nov 1993 Physics Teacher in an article by Gerald Hart 
and Paul Cottle.  The title is Academic Backgrounds and Achievement in 
College Physics

"It seems plausible that students who have had previous exposure to basic 
physics concepts in a high-school physics course would have an advantage 
in taking college physics and our results support this hypothesis.  the 
distributions of grades (in their college physic course) among students 
who had and had not taken physics in high school are shown.  A comparison 
of these two distributions using the Mann-Whitney test yields 
statistically significant differences in the performance of the two 
groups.  Students who had taken physics in high school earned an average 
grade of 2.4 in College Physic A; students who had not taken high-school 
physics had an average grade of only 1.8.  Of the students who had not 
taken high-school physics 40% earned grades of D or F (compared with only 
18% for students who had taken high-school physics).  Only 7% of the non 
high school physics eared A or A- but 18% of the students with 
high-school physics earned A or A- in College Physics A."

Of course one can alway dismiss any study by stating that it is not 
universal.  Gosh we don't even know if physics is taught in other parts 
of the universe.  

Bruce Esser
Physics Teacher                   Something witty
Marian High School                     Should go here
Omaha NE
http://marian.creighton.edu