As much as I appreciate Richard Hake's posting, I take issue with this one.
The Phys-L posts have revolved around the kinesthetic experiences of pushing
bowling balls, cars, bikes, etc. You can't much more kinesthetic than that.
It also seems to me that real-life experiences that vary slightly every day
and also occur everyday provide powerful contexts for learning, for
continual reinforcement of learning, and for the transfer of that learning.
We often use cars, bikes, and bowling balls, whereas we rarely push large
blocks of dry ice on glass.
Larry Woolf;General Atomics;San Diego CA
92121;Ph:858-526-8575;FAX:858-526-8568; www.ga.com;www.sci-ed-ga.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Hake
Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2002 9:28 AM
I think most of the eight Phys-L posts
<http://lists.nau.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S2=phys-l&q=&s=arons&f=&a=2002&b=>
in response to Justin have missed the importance of Arons's sage
emphasis on KINESTHETIC EXPERIENCE in overcoming preconceptions. To
appreciate this one needs to see students' eyes light up when they
first accelerate a 50-lb dry ice block floating on glass to some
velocity v and then see the block sailing majestically away from them
with undiminished v.
As stated in an earlier post (Hake 2002a):
". . .(the Arons inspired). . . SDI labs. . .[despite their
demonstrated effectiveness (Hake 1998a,b; 2002b,c)] are virtually
unknown to most physics teachers and Physics Education Researchers
(PER's), and generally ignored in standard PER reference volumes
(e.g., Redish & Rigden 1997). For an online article on SDI labs see
Hake (1992).
This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the
AAPT.
This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.