American education has produced a number of physics Nobelists.
How many were products of physics courses that would be approved by PER
enthusiasts?
-------------------------------------------
Ahh yes. Just because a system works some, does not mean that it is working
optimally. I admit that the very top will often excel even when the
teaching is wretched. Einstein is an example of that.
So even before modern medicine some people got well after being treated by
the usual blood letting methods. Doctors were assumed to know what they
were doing. But the ones who got well were not proof that doctors were
doing the correct thing. People get better on their own, and some students
forge ahead on their own.
I think one might be more able to correlate the wealth of a country to Nobel
prizes. Does anyone have any other statistical correlations that might be
applicable? Social and political freedom might also be highly correlated.
But please notice that what I am saying is that the overall gain is higher
and that lower students are doing better. Richard Hake has proposed the
same thing.
Let us not forget what happened to the American automobile manufacturers who
gloried in their ability to produce cars for the US market. They ignored
the research about manufacturing and quality control that was done in the
US, but the Japanese applied it.
Sorry, but the old saw that we have done well in the past is an indication
of our "good" education is not proof of anything. It could very well be an
artifact of other things. The usual complaint by college professors that
students are coming in unprepared is a good argument that something is
broken. But the evidence is that teachers are actually doing much the same
thing they have been doing for years. I have students who have taken and
passed college calculus, but they can't write a simple equation or an
integral. So what was going on? The evidence from the physics conceptual
evaluations and new math conceptual evaluations line up with the idea that
the education is not working well. This is compelling evidence, but the
number of Noble Laureates has not been statistically correlated with the
type of education, so it is absolutely no evidence of anything about our
educationl system.
Einstein fought QM for years because he had a paradigm that it was not
correct. But the research accumulated and eventually he was no longer able
to argue against it. The same thing is happening with research based
education. So please come up with VALID evidence that PER is not correct.
A vague iffy correlation with past performance is not valid evidence, and
would probably not be allowed in a student paper let alone a journal. I
have probably hundreds of pounds of articles confirming this, but I have not
seen one that shows that conventional methods work better than research
based ones. So please come up with a good paper that shows this.
Oh yes, how many failures were produced by conventional US education? This
is a lot larger number than the Nobel Laureates, and may be a lot more
significant statistically.