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?