Re: [Phys-l] Student engagement--GAIN

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

"Show me that my nice blood stained prestigious coat is source of patient's
deaths" is what the traditional physician might have said.

The factor here is that you are getting students who have been reviewed to
death in a traditional sense.  The gain in their classes is demonstrably
low.  To change things you have to come up with a figure of merit and then
try to achieve it.  So OK, the current tests are not perfect, but they are
fairly good goals.  Jerry Epstein has come up with a calculus diagnostic
that shows students do not understand calculus.  Nancy Baxter Hastings with
the help of Prisciall Laws has come up with workshop calculus that shows
better results.  There are preliminary indicators that the inquiry style
calculus courses show gain on the Epstein test.  We now need an algebra
diagnostic test.

Who makes up the SAT and ACT questions?  Neither you nor I do!  It is done
by an X letter acronym.  Who makes up the poor state tests, and who writes
the inaccurate middle and high school texts?

The fact that things have gone the other way is not because of PER.  Make up
a questionnaire that teases out the amount of IE in the courses before
yours.  I suspect you will find that it is almost ZERO.  It is the current
method of teaching procedures for solving equations rather than getting the
students to first come up with their own, before teaching an algorithm that
is killing math.  A dyed in the wool conservative math teacher just
inveighed against the current method of teaching math, but was unwilling to
look at inquiry.

Students are being given drill review rather than education.  So please do
not blame something which has not been used with your students.  Actually
the lower students who are not attempting to go to college are given mainly
review, but the upper ones often have more liberal but traditional
education.

Do the Philip Sadler thing and try to figure out what factors the students
have been exposed to.  His surveys also do not have a significant number of
students in prior IE courses.

I too see ill equipped students, but I also see tremendous gain in more
things than just the FCI.  I see transfer going on.  I also see
administrators and parents who try to kill the PER innovations because they
don't understand what is going on.  Instead they approve of increased test
review to the point of no teaching going on.  Teachers who use and
understand the PER methods do become enthusiastic because, besides gain on
tests, they see other things improving that have not been measured.  PER
energizes teachers as well as improving test scores.  Even if it didn't
improve student learning, that alone is worth the entry price.

I will admit to just having a low class that has made tremendous progress
where the students have given me enthusiastic reviews.  So I am upbeat,
after having retired from a school with a bad micro-managing administrator.
Everyone in the school agreed about that.  I will have some good science
students going on this year, and I have always had some go on.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> I'll present this and then step away from this conversation (which too
> often
> becomes a monologue)--I've said this all before and don't want to enter a
> heated debate here.
>
> Who decides the criteria for GAIN?  Who produces the instruments to
> measure
> the GAIN?  Who then designs methods and courses to directly address those
> criteria and instruments?  Three guesses--and you only need three letters!
>
> The only GAIN I'm interested in from pre-College courses, is that I start
> seeing some students who know some basics (say understand velocity and
> acceleration)--so that we don't have to start from scratch.  I have not
> seen
> this.  I have seen things go the other way.  So, forget your FCI
> normalized
> gains and the like--show me students better prepared for College science
> courses--not those needing remedial arithematic!