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Re: [Phys-l] Unit Conversions (was Mass and Energy)



I think what Rick T. is saying is highly accurate and highly important.

I would hasten to add that in addition to personal responsibility, there
are secondary factors including parental responsibility (especially for
younger students) and, yes, even some school responsibility ... but the
point remains that personal responsibility remains primary and fundamental.

NCLB has many faults, but the deepest one is that it shifts attention
away from what is primary and fundamental: personal responsibility.
And NCLB did not create this problem; rather it merely reflects and
codifies a set of widely held (albeit rarely articulated) beliefs.

Here's my advice: If you want to see educational gains, the schools need
not improve the way they explain physics facts; they should improve the way
they instill a sense of personal responsibility.

Note: I hereby explicitly restrict my remarks to HS juniors and seniors
who have chosen an elective course in physics. Such students should be
the most grown-up and most responsible segment of the HS population.
(There have been proposals to teach physics to the general population of
HS freshmen, but that's still quite rare in practice, and in any case
it's not what I'm talking about.) Also, one would hope that college
students would be even more grown-up and resonsible.

I am aware of "research" that says such students are innately incapable of
metaphor, innately incapable of abstraction, and indeed innately incapable
of what we would call "thinking". However, there is also well-documented
research that says just the opposite.
http://newton.nap.edu/html/howpeople1/

Given the choice between research that agrees with common sense and with my
personal observations, and "research" that doesn't, I choose to believe the
former.

In a lecture the other day, I said "physics is easy". Some members of the
audience objected, saying "our students don't think it's easy". I explained
that physics seems hard because the standards are so high. If you tried to
hold social science -- including child development studies, and "education
research" -- to equivalently high standards of precision and reproducibility,
the latter wouldn't be hard; it would be impossible. When testing a new
drug, it is super-important to use double-blind studies, appropriate randomization,
and so forth; otherwise the results will be unreliable. Alas, I have no idea
how to carry out a double-blind test of teaching techniques.

This offers some partial theoretical explanation for the oft-observed fact
that "education research" results are irreproducible. If I read that research
shows the mass of the proton to be xxxx, I expect the result to be consistent
with other measurements of the same thing (or, failing that, I expect a very
detailed analysis of why not). In contrast, if I read that "research shows
that most kids are incapable of abstraction" I just don't believe it. There's
no reason why I should.

As previously discussed, I observe that children in their recreation time
exhibit abstraction, symbolism, metaphor, imagination, and, yes, thinking.
If they do not exhibit such skills in the physics class, that's a problem,
but not an insurmountable problem.

Person saying it can't be done is liable to be interrupted by persons doing it.
(H.E. Fosdick.)