Re: [Phys-l] Students' READING abilities

["Rick Tarara" <rtarara@saintmarys.edu>]

I can only cite anecdotal evidence, but the most striking to me was a few 
years ago when I was running some 'extra' pre classes for students about to 
take the MCAT test.  At that time (I think they have returned to this 
format, but don't teach those students anymore) the MCAT tested physics 
knowledge through short reading sections and a series of questions on those 
sections.  The topics would normally be something that student most likely 
would be unfamiliar with.  One of my prep techniques was to use old 
(released) test questions, have students read, answer the questions, then 
read again, and then tell me what the reading section was about.  I had only 
one student who could do this well, but she clearly indicated that she had 
been extremely well prepared in READING by he pre-college education.  The 
other students could not tell me what the passages really said.

A very recent example, from my gen-ed, energy course, is a question from 
last Friday's quiz that refers directly to a discussion that took up the 
last 10 minutes of the Wednesday class.  The question was:

"What argument did we make Wednesday to support various actions proposed to 
combat Global Warming regardless of whether or not the predictions of the 
climate scientists are accurate?

75% of the class didn't even attempt to answer the question posed.  Most 
started listing the "various actions" as an answer.  To me, this was mostly 
a reading problem (and remember, they could put the question in the context 
of what had very recently occurred in class), and in fact, I ended up 
writing READ THE QUESTION! on most of the papers.

I would offer (have before) that listening and viewing skills are no better. 
Students can entirely miss the most obvious points of a video presentation. 
If all these basic communication skills are so weak, it isn't very 
surprising (to me) that force feeding a (now more limited) set of material 
to students in a setting where they don't have to read, don't have to 
listen, don't have to take notes, can be more 'successful' than depending on 
these traditional learning skills.  However, how well then are we preparing 
students to be 'life-long' learners if we over structure all their learning. 
Reading, watching, listening are critical skills for later success--are we 
giving up on them?

Rick

***************************
Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN
rtarara@saintmarys.edu
******************************

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Folkerts, Timothy J" <FolkertsT@bartonccc.edu>
To: "Forum for Physics Educators" <phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 8:26 AM
Subject: [Phys-l] Students' READING abilities


> I am mostly a lurker here and have not had a chance to search the
> literature, but I was wondering what studies have been done correlating
> READING ability with success in science courses.  I have seen discussion
> here (and elsewhere) about correlations with high school physics, math
> skills, Piaget cognitive levels, teaching methods, and others.
>
>
> But what about reading ability?  This came up because I gave a "quiz"
> over the famous nonsense poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll ("Twas
> brillig, and the slithy toves, Did gyre and gimble in the wabe ...").  I
> then asked a few questions like "What were the toves like?"
>
> The point I was TRYING to make with the quiz was that it is possible to
> read something and get an answer without the least understanding of what
> is being said (much like the typical "parrot answers" I get on questions
> about the reading).  They need to dig deeper and THINK about what the
> words mean.
>
> The OTHER lesson I learned is that a small but significant number of
> students didn't seem to be able to use the structure of the sentence to
> decide that "toves" was the subject of the sentence and "slithy" was an
> adjective describing the "toves"!  Granted this was an introductory
> Physical Science class that draws some of the lower level students at
> our community college, but I was still surprised at the results.
>
>
> Perhaps in addition to teaching science (and math and how to use a
> calculator and how to think abstractly), we also need to think about
> teaching how to READ!
>
>
> Tim Folkerts
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