[Phys-L] Re: What students will do. (was: Physics Solutions Manual)

["David T. Marx" <marx@PHY.ILSTU.EDU>]

I do reading quizzes using clickers at the beginning of each class.  I find that students now read
the book, where they barely looked at it before reading quizzes.  When surveyed, 87% indicated that
the reading quizzes made them read the book much more than they would have otherwise.

The problem I ran into last semester was that students could not comprehend what they were reading -
 even after, in some cases, reading it five or six times and taking pages of notes.  When I looked
at the pages of notes, I found a series of statements with no connection begin made between them or
any attempt to summarize what had been read.

Regards,
David Marx
Illinois State University

> Priscilla Laws commented that their students hardly crack open the
> text, so the problem is not unique.  Indeed in the stone age when I
> went to school that was also a problem.
>
> One comment was made that the PER methods are designed to get student
> to do in class what they used to do outside of class.  This is
> slightly incorrect.  It gets them to do in class what they SHOULD do
> outside of class.  There is no evidence that they ever did it outside
> of class.  Feynman complained about lack of student understanding long
> before the FCI was developed.  Some PER methods, notably Mazur's,
> requires students to come into class after having read the text.  He
> enforces it with a short reading quiz every lecture.
>
> The real difficulty that students have is that they don't know how to
> think about things, so they need the sort of guidance provided by the
> PER curricula.
>
> John M. Clement
> Houston, TX
>
> > Even w/ a free text some won't read it.  The last week of my ten
> > week
> > stint teaching Chem. at North High several of my "A" students
> > admitted
> > they never opened the text except to do the assigned chapter end
> > problems.  They said they got all they needed from my lectures.  A
> > left
> > handed compliment on my teaching?
> >
> > bc, if he had the chance would now minimize the "direct" method
> >
> > Spagna Jr., George wrote:
> >
> > > Bernard asks
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > p.s. George, did you readopt a text because their grades plummeted?
> > >
> > > And Joel adds
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > Or because you got tired of listening to the complaints on student
> > > evaluations?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > Or, what was the reason?
> > >
> > > It's a bit more complicated - top grades slipped a little, and more
> > > students "fell off" the bottom of the distribution.  More
> > > importantly,
> > > it became clear that by not using a set textbook we were apparently
> >
> > cut
>
>
>
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