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Re: Misconceptions assessments?



On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, John Denker wrote:

At 09:20 AM 11/7/00 -0500, Robert A Cohen suggested asking (true or false):
Radioactivity is man-made.

I disagree with the suggested "F" answer. Man-made radioactivity has
existed for over 50 years. In the room where I'm sitting, virtually all of
the radioactivity is in the form of Americium.

Or does the question hinge on the definition of what "is" is?

Perhaps a better statement would be "all radioactivity is man-made"? I
just wanted to keep the same wording as that used in the indicators:
<http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind00/append/c8/at08-09.xls>

Scientific law is considered to be more important than scientific theory.

Huh? I'm not sure what this question is driving at.

Is it common for somebody (about to enter service as a teacher) to answer
"T" to this question? If so, what does that answer indicate?
-- deep-seated misconceptions about physics and epistemology?
-- politically-incorrect vocabulary?

I'm curious - which do you think it represents - the former or the latter?

I'm not sure where I got this particular statement from but I'm pretty
sure it was used to assess whether the respondent believes a law to be a
proven theory. Most of my pre-service teachers do think that and
consequently believe that the theory of evolution or the theory of
relativity is on a less-firm foundation than, say, hooke's law, which they
assume has been proven (and that is why we no longer call it hooke's
theory).

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| Robert Cohen Department of Physics |
| East Stroudsburg University |
| bbq@esu.edu East Stroudsburg, PA 18301 |
| http://www.esu.edu/~bbq/ (570) 422-3428 |
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