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At 18:59 -0500 4/29/02, Rick Tarara wrote:
I suspect that the issue is how much we can teach these students in
My question is, I believe, very relevant. The PER studies are being used to
strongly suggest that we entirely change the way physics is taught. The new
techniques and pedagogy seem to produce better performance on certain
assessment tools, such as the FCI and FCME. However, a point I made years
ago is that we seem to have produced a reasonably good crop of scientists
and engineers throughout the last century. So what is the educational goal
here? Get good scores on a handful of conceptual tests or produce the best
educated scientists, engineers, and others? These MAY go together, but that
is my question. What evidence is there that active engagement courses with
whatever gains (and limitations) they may have, produces better graduates
than the current techniques and pedagogy? I have this nagging fear that
there is something about the traditional educational approach that may be
really important (but unrecognized) in the process of training students. We
might be fixing one problem (poor conceptual understanding in introductory
courses) for something else. I hardly see why Brian should be sorrowed or
piqued, but it is right to be so. ;-)
one year, which is all most of them will ever get of physics, or
perhaps any other science. If we are limiting ourselves to a one-year
outlook, then the stuff that the PER folks are pushing are probably
important, but at the margin, for I suspect that very few students,
even under optimum conditions will get very far in their
understanding of physics or any science in just one year.
It was certainly true in my case, and in many others that I know of,
that understanding only came with time, and even after many years, it
is still coming here and there--with time. So, if this is true, and I
suspect it is, then our science education program for non-scientists
should be at least as comprehensive as is our mathematics education
program for non-mathematicians--that is, it should start early and
continue over several years, starting no later than fifth
grade--preferably earlier--and continuing well into, if not through
high school, and colleges should not let their students satisfy a
science requirement with a cookbook course that teaches them nothing
about the nature of science or how it is done. I suspect that when
the universities put courses like this in the hands of their very
best and most eminent teachers, and make sure that they are suitably
rewarded for such efforts, and in addition require that their
applicants have a significant amount of science in their pre-college
curriculum, then we may see the type of citizens that we need
graduate--and the quality of our science and engineering graduates
will be pretty much as it is now.
What we are doing now is probably as good as we were doing forty
years ago, and is probably as good at producing scientists and
engineers now as it was then. I think the issue now is not that
group, which would probably get where they are despite what the
education system is doing to them (in most cases), but the group that
will not become scientists but considering the impact that science is
having on their lives, needs to understand something about science.
Just a few of the current public issues that profoundly affect
science and which are profoundly affected by science are: nuclear
power, energy conservation, global warming, the ozone layer, rain
forest destruction, fishery destruction, flood control,loss of
privacy and degradation of civil rights due to technological
development, stem cell research, food irradiation, genetic
engineering, smokestack pollution, toxic wastes--the list goes on.
Important decisions are being made about all of these topics and
others almost daily, by people whose understanding of science is
essentially nil, and who represent people who understand even less.
It seems to me that the necessity of getting a populace who can
understand the basic nature of these issues and can develop some
intelligent opinions on them is absolutely critical to our survival
as a species. We need scientifically literate citizens even more than
we need scientists. In order to get there, the quality of science
education we offer these potential non-scientist-citizens has to
improve by at least a few orders of magnitude.
Hugh
--
Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>
(919) 467-7610
Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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