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I responded to Mike's posting on "making physics fun", and
gave a couple of examples fun in science. Since the numbeer of students
and teachers of physics at Downers Grove South High School are matters of
record, as are the subsequent performances of the graduates, this hardly
qualifies as "anecdotal evidence'.
I don't know whether John is a pontificator, but he raises two
other issues extraneous to the one at hand. One is FCI scores, and the
other seems to be anecdotal evidence about his experience with his own
children. Such evidence would be, it would seem, truly anecdotal, not
being part of any records. So, true to John's polemic, let's ignore it.
I question whether FCI scores serve as an efficient proxy for
effectiveness of physics teaching. There are no Nobel prizes for high FCI
scores. Traditional physics teaching has given us a number of Nobel
Laureates of whom three were fellow graduate students - one of the Nobel's
was in economics. But maybe looking at Nobel's is a little restrictive.
Another possible measure is membership in the National Academy of
Sciences. By my not very careful count, a PhD from Princeton's Physics
department practically guarantees election to the NAS. As best as I can
tell from my own experience (here I wax anecdotal) FCI gains track
closely with scores on weekly quizzes and Final Exams (which I usually use
old AP exams for).
Discounting anecdotal evidence, as we should, we need careful
studies of the relationship between FCI gains and long term performance in
science and engineering before we treat FCI gains as the sacred symbols of
successful physics teaching. But that, as I said in the beginning, is
another topic.