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[Phys-l] Strong Students




This discussion about textbooks has me wondering ... much of PER seems to focus on statistical measures of improvement, such as they are. There seems to be a sense of developing strategies that effectively reach the middle and the bottom. The experience of the very best students, however, I have never seen singled out. We are instructed, for example, that what WE (by which I mean folks who end up going into this sort of thing for a living) would have wanted as students is not relevant information, because we are, in some sense or other, outliers.

I think of this often because I am virtually the opposite of what I'm constantly reading is "typical" of students in physics courses. (Frankly, sometimes a lot of this sounds like so much intellectual snobbery, but that's a discussion for another day.) A recent example was how the "typical student" regards proofs in class and/or textbooks.

Anyway, the point of my question is this: has there been much study of how well students at the top are served by PER-based methodologies?


David Craig


<http://web.lemoyne.edu/~craigda/>