I have taught inquiry-based and PBL courses, and also am using inquiry techniques with my calculus-based physics class, so I have some experience in this matter.
Some of the mentioned discomfort is due to the students' inexperience with facing unfamiliar things. I find that I do indeed have to "chuck the students into the water," especially the reluctant ones, to get them started. However, I also make sure that at first, the water is only six inches deep. Of course, the difficulty and depth of the "water" increases gradually as confidence builds and the course progresses. For inquiry methods to succeed, it is essential that the students find the experiences both enjoyable and successful. This is especially important with elementary education majors, over half of whom, at the beginning of the course, admitted to liking science and mathematics "if it isn't too hard." It is failure that turns them off, not math or science per se.
The other source of student discomfort and "reluctance to change" results from many previous experiences with the consequences of getting the wrong answer. I make it clear to the students that they are to draw conclusions from their own observations, whether they agree with the book or not, and (since students are eager to please the instructor) that I will still like them even if they get the wrong answer. It's important to remove that fear. I stress that it's the experiments that _don't work_ that are the more interesting, because these lead one to think deeper and learn more. I try to avoid experiments in which students make a measurement, then look in the book to see how wrong their results were. Instead, I try to have them succeed at doing something standard to build confidence (measuring the spring constant of a spring, for example), and when they succeed, have them do something related where the answer is unknown (such as measuring the spring constant and find the elastic limit of a stretchy toy snake or a gummi worm). In my calculus-based physics labs, I have returned to a nineteenth-century style of instruction in which I have almost eliminated step-by-step instructions in favor of setting goals and letting the students figure out how to achieve them. The results have been excellent, and the students are doing a lot of independent thinking...and loving it.
Vickie Frohne
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From: Forum for Physics Educators on behalf of Brian Whatcott
Sent: Fri 10/1/2004 8:22 PM
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
Subject: Re: Student resistance to changes in professional education practice
Richard describes student discomfort as "resistance to change."
But I have been gathering the distinct impression both
from Richard's posts here and others in the same vein,
that it is a process somewhat comparable to learning to swim
by being chucked in the water: no matter how skilled the
accompanying life-guard - it is hard to get comfortable with
the panicked impression of impending death.
One doubtless has crystal-clear recollections of learning to swim
in this manner long afterwards: the student standardized gain
is high, the recall is good years later, in fact.
Now, having shared this impression, I am reminded of the surgeons'
then later the obstetricians' view that pain was a normal part of
operations and child-birth and that it was not to be gain-said
- a view which has ebbed over the years since the dome in
Mass General Hospital contained the stoic soldiers who sat in
the operating {kitchen} chair, at first implacable, later wilting
to unconsciousness as shock took effect
while the bone saw was at work to amputate their damaged &
infected limbs.
I suppose these metaphors are begging me to enquire if some
educational anaesthetic cannot be found to ease students' pain
with research/enquiry methods.