Re: Opening at East Central College

[Bob LaMontagne <rlamont@POSTOFFICE.PROVIDENCE.EDU>]

I find this post appallingly arrogant. Assuming that the poster from ECC
was legitimate, he/she was describing a nightmare situation where the
only concern of the Dean was that the  students pass the courses so they
will sign up for more. To suggest that the lack of use of PER
invalidates any complaints by that poor faculty member is the height of
chutzpah!

(Unless, of course, PER lowers the bar so low that everyone passes.)

Bob at PC

John Clement wrote:
> ght be a warning of things to come.
>
> One important issue was the course for elementary school teachers.  T=
> his
> type of course should be completely PER oriented.  There is some exce=
> llent
> material written at Dickinson College by Priscilla Laws' collaborator=
> s which
> can server as the basis for an elementary school teacher course in ph=
> ysical
> science.  Such a course needs to address the same issues as a convent=
> ional
> research based physics course, but at a lower level.  It should also =
> be
> designed to promote an increase in the Piagetian level, especially
> proportional reasoning, control of variable, two variable reasoning, =
> and
> conservation reasoning.  There are certainly other good materials ava=
> ilable,
> but the anonymous poster did not seem to show any awareness of this.
............
> If this is a genuine post by someone at the school in question, my sy=
> mpathy
> is not that high.  They apparently have not tried to implement resear=
> ch
> based strategies to teach the students.