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In her POD post of 25 Nov 2003 17:03:03-0800 titled "Life-long
Learning Skills," Lynda Harding addresses an important issue: " . . .
=2E I've been thinking about the intersection between content
knowledge, information competence, and life-long learning. . . .
Seems to me that a biology faculty member, for example, would want
students to graduate being able to springboard into a new area of the
discipline, gathering information, evaluating and synthesizing new
information. To what extent does the content knowledge students gain
during an undergraduate education provide the cognitive scaffold on
which to build new knowledge structures? To what extent does it
provide a yardstick against which the validity of new information can
be judged?"
Alan Van Heuvelen (2001) has insightfull addressed such matters for
physics education, but his message applies as well to other
scientific disciplines. His abstract reads:
"We review three important ideas concerning physics education. First,
what do surveys from the workplace indicate about the relative
importance in student education of scientific process knowledge,
personal skills, and conceptual physics knowledge? Second, what are
the characteristics of student minds that need to acquire this
knowledge and these skills? Finally, what can we do with physics
learning systems to help these minds better acquire this knowledge
and these skills?"
In Hake (2000), a figure on:
Page 23 depicts workplace skills as set forth by the American
Institute of Physics, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Labor
Dept., ABET (Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology), and
the Van Heuvelen/Andre synthesis of those four, after Van Heuvelen &
Andre (2000).
Page 25 depicts the Goldschmid's (1999) four-quadrant circle which
"presents several discipline-independent dimensions, which should
gain more importance in the curricula of the University of the
Future. . . (ref. 19).. . . Complementary entrepreneurial
inclinations, humanistic considerations, and multicultural skills for
example, might serve the future graduate better than
strictly technical knowledge. The question is how can these subjects
be built into the curriculum without necessarily adding new courses?"
In Hake (2002) I wrote (bracketed by lines "HHHHHHH. . . . ."
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Does the class average normalized gain <g> for the [any of the tests
of conceptual understanding of mechanics] provide a definitive
assessment of the OVERALL effectiveness of an introductory physics
class? NO! It assesses "ONLY THE ATTAINMENT OF A MINIMAL CONCEPTUAL
UNDERSTANDING OF MECHANICS. In some
first-semester or first quarter introductory physics courses,
subjects other than mechanics are often covered. The effectiveness of
the course in promoting student understanding of those topics would
not, of course, be assessed by the normalized gain on [any of the
tests of conceptual understanding of mechanics]. Furthermore, as
indicated in Hake (1998b), among desirable outcomes of the
introductory course that <g> DOES NOT measure directly are students':
(a) satisfaction with and interest in physics;
(b) understanding of the nature, methods, and limitations of science;
(c) understanding of the processes of scientific inquiry such as
experimental design, control of variables, dimensional analysis,
order-of-magnitude estimation, thought experiments, hypothetical
reasoning, graphing, and error analysis;
(d) ability to articulate their knowledge and learning processes;
(e) ability to collaborate and work in groups;
(f) communication skills;
(g) ability to solve real-world problems;
(h) understanding of the history of science and the relationship of
science to society and other disciplines;
(i) understanding of, or at least appreciation for, "modern" physics;
(j) ability to participate in authentic research.
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
The late Arnold Arons [for a review see Hake (2003)] put particular
emphasis on all the above, save "i" and "j".
Richard Hake
REFERENCES