If this were true, then classes in other countries might exhibit gains
similar to what the PER people have observed. However they don't see
similar gains. And the level of thinking does not advance greatly. A
fairly recent paper by BAO showed that students in China had much higher FCI
scores, but that was after 4 to 5 years of exposure to physics. The high
scores are actually similar to what one gets with PER in one year. There is
no doubt that Asian students are motivated to study.
But the most telling thing is that students in their first year college
physics course, while they had much higher incoming FCI scores than in the
US they had identical thinking skill scores as measured by the Lawson test.
So the only thing that Chinese students had was better physics understanding
but after a much longer period of exposure in HS.
If you want to learn, and the pedagogy is not appropriate the learning will
still be very transitory. However a study published in The Physics Teacher
showed that FCI gains persisted for up to 3 YEARS! PER works even with less
motivated students, but not as well. So getting up the motivation would
probably produce measurably higher gains in PER classes, but only marginally
higher gains in conventional classes.
Effective learning is hot just one thing, but multiple factors. Proper
pedagogy, student motivation, student preparation, alignment of the
curriculum... All of these contribute, but we have control over pedagogy.
The overloaded curriculum is something we have only marginal control over,
and the other factors are almost impossible for us to control. However
student motivation can be increased, but not by doing popular things. Once
students see the value of study and realize that they are experiencing "real
learning" the motivation goes up. But trying to pump it up artificially
does exactly the opposite of what you want. There was a good article in the
NY Times education section which presented the evidence that psychologists
have found that praising students for being smart had a negative effect on
achievement.
John M. Clement
Houston, TX
-----------------------------------------------
I too have been troubled by what people define as student engagement - even
from the PER community. After teaching for 20+ years, I have come to the
conclusion that in many ways what a teacher asks students to do - whether it
is listen to a lecture or do an active-engagement exercise/experiment or a
create their own lab and analyze it - they will learn nothing if their mind
and heart are not engaged.
As long as you have students who do whatever a teacher asks them to do for
no other reason than to get a grade then you will not have any learning
occur at all. Oh yes, they may make the grade. But most of them will forget
most of what they have been taught in less than a year.
They key to learning anything is to want to learn it. Nobody can make you
learn it if you don't want to learn! And nobody can stop you from learning
if you want to learn!
I believe that if administrators, teachers, students and parents would
accept this reality, we would see a tremendous improvement in student
performance as measured by the understanding and retention of knowledge and
the development of skill.