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Re: Setting up problems



I'm not surprised by this. In my work with pre-service and in-service
elementary school teachers, the students or teachers are usually
uncomfortable with science. They're not very knowledgable about science, nor
are they very "good" at it. Yet they are expected to teach science. Their
coping strategies are to stress the memorization of "definitions" and to
follow the instructions for kid-science activities EXACTLY. Many of the
in-service teachers were very reluctant to try even the most trivial
substitutions (plastic cup for paper cup, for example). This is sometimes
partially due to an ingrained fear of science, or more precisely, the fear
of it "not working." I have seen many pre-service teachers (elementary
education majors) give beautiful sample lessons on physics concepts, but not
until they have rattled off the "definition." It's like they have to get it
out of their system before they can proceed. Ask 'em to explain the
definition, or give an example of it, and they're helpless.
I don't blame the teachers. They're not supposed to be experts in
science. The problem is often the curriculum. Many teacher manuals go like
this: "Provide this stuff and instruct the students to do that. Have the
students observe what happens. Now ask the children to explain it." The end.
No WONDER the children don't learn basic science concepts! No wonder many
teachers don't like to teach science! The way some of these books are
written, science projects are just like art projects only messier, more
expensive, harder to set up, and with less instructional value.
If you're teaching high school science, this is all the science your
students have ever known. They don't know how to apply concepts because
they've never had to do so before. You have to teach them that memorization
does not equal knowledge.

Hint: Stay positive. Build on the "definitions." Teach applications
and examples. Tell your students that you think they're ready and smart
enough for "advanced" work. Be explicit in explaining the sequence from
elementary to advanced:

Elementary: plug and chug, putting numbers into "book" formulas
Basic: Choosing an equation from the book and rearranging to get the answer
Intermediate: Combining two or more equations from the book to get the
answer.
Advanced: *Making your own equation* by looking at the particular situation
(statics problems with force diagrams are a great place to start teaching
this)

BTW, I've seen many college students who had difficulty with any
reasoning process requiring two steps or more. Why do biology majors have to
take physics? Because it teaches them to think.

Vickie Frohne
-----Original Message-----
From: David T. Marx [mailto:dtmarx@ILSTU.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 10:04 AM
To: PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu
Subject: Re: Setting up problems

Students commonly state, "I know the concepts. I have them memorized."

They also are demanding the kind of "plug and chug" problems they have grown
accustomed to doing.

Students describe their difficulty as "understanding the definitions,"
"being able to calculate
quantities," but not being "able to apply the concepts" to solving a
problem.