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Re: Test writing



At 11:16 PM -0500 4/26/02, Brian Whatcott wrote:

Given a moderate tract of novel information from you, one asks a
student to teach it back to you and the remaining students, and
encourages critique, and expects the fullest participation from the
assembled body, as each succeeding tract is successively presented.

You can be quite certain the student speaker's level of recall will
comfortably exceed any presentation you might dramatize,
though you pop balloons, swallow liquid nitrogen and
dazzle with witty repartee.

I do believe you're right, Brian. But witty repartee takes seconds
(that's all the wit I I have!), and students teaching students takes
hours.

Could it be that all the thoughtful talk about different approaches
to teaching ("physics modeling," "active physics," the
"students-teaching-students" approach that you describe, etc.) all
succumb to the rule of breadth vs. depth? Let me even try to make it
quantitative ...

Let's suppose that students acquires a certain (non-negligible!)
"volume" of understanding during a year-long physics course.
Perhaps, for ANY sensible teaching method, the volume of the average
student's ultimate understanding is given by

V = kdA

where:

k = coefficient of teacher enthusiasm (dimensionless ... and
priceless for high values)
d = average depth of topics taught (proportional to time spent per topic)
A = breadth of topics taught (proportional to number of chapters "covered")

Any thoughtful, new approach to teaching may inspire higher values of
"k", just because of its novelty. But perhaps it doesn't
significantly affect the product dA. And, after all, perhaps k is
inversely proportional to time!

- Tucker (tryin' to keep k high)
--
***********************************
Tucker Hiatt, Director
Wonderfest
P.O. Box 887
(39 Fernhill Avenue)
Ross, CA 94957
hiattu00@usfca.edu
415-577-1126 (voice)
415-454-2535 (fax)
http://www.wonderfest.org

Truth is a great flirt. - Franz Liszt
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