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[Phys-L] Re: Ambiguous Question



I tend towards JC's response.

If the writer had written "... in the direction of the dock.", then it
would have been a completely legitimately ambiguous question. Even so,
unless the writer is in the habit of writing "trick" questions, I think
part of the exercise is to determine what is the question. Really now,
17 meters, come off it.

bc

p.s. reminds me of thru the looking glass. How many of those students
had read it?

John Clement wrote:
There are some curricula which pose ambiguous questions or at least
questions with missing information, or extra information. These are a step
ahead and come straight out of PER.

The Minnesota model for physics education was proposed by Ken and Pat
Heller. In this they use rich context questions. Then there is the Minds
on Physics series from U.Mass Amherst group UMPERG. This goes a step
farther by having missing or incomplete information. They also pose
questions which have several answers or sometimes no answers. For example
when they ask students to identify vector and scalar quantities, they also
include the category other and have items such as shape, color... There is
some indication that they are getting students to do expert like problem
solving.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


As a clarification of my previous note:

The problem is not the ambiguous question.
The problem is that the ambiguous question was badly handled.

In the real world, where you get paid to answer questions -- as
opposed to the artificial world of homework questions -- virtually
*all* of the questions are ambiguous or otherwise ill-posed.

IMHO it would be great for students to have *more* experience
dealing with ambiguous questions. But first they need to be
taught how to deal with them ... and the professor needs to
understand how to deal with them ... and the "system" needs to
be set up properly. Alas, today's typical classroom (especially
during tests) lacks many of the mechanisms that the real world
uses to resolve ambiguities. For example, in the real world
you would turn in an early draft of the answer and ask whether
it was heading in the right direction.

For more detail on this, see
http://www.av8n.com/physics/ill-posed.htm


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