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Re: [Phys-l] Sample problems and derivations...



Hi John,

I certainly take your point. In all of science you can never take any one
paper as solid evidence. You have to look for a preponderance of evidence
pointing in a given direction. Saying that the literature can say anything
makes it sound (to me) like you are disturbed by the messy details of the
trees of science and peer-review instead of looking at the forest and which
way it seems to be growing.

When you say that the intuition of any given classroom teacher are better
than PER results I just don't know what to do with that. Are you just saying
that the field is so young that it hasn't made any breakthroughs yet? I
can't imagine you making a similar statement about any other scientific
endeavor...

Jeff

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 4:51 PM, John Denker <jsd@av8n.com> wrote:

On 08/03/2010 02:06 PM, Jeff Loats wrote:

At the recent AAPT meeting I heard it mentioned that both doing sample
problems on the board and showing derivations in a similar manner have a
minimal impact on student learning. This happens to fit with my
preconceptions about teaching, so of course I am not here to challenge
this
idea. ;-)

So far so good!

Mostly I am hoping to find evidence for this in a PER article somewhere.
If
anyone on here knows of such a publication I would be grateful for a
citation.

I'd say quit while you're ahead. The problem is that you can find
evidence for almost anything in the literature.

I'm not saying the PER literature is particularly worse relative to
the literature in other fields I can think of, but in absolute terms
it's bad. I'm going to pick on it today because it is relevant to
the question that was asked, and to the topic of this list.

Just so you know where I'm coming from, I worked in the "neural
networks" field at a time when 90% of the published papers in the
field were nonsense. People sneered at me for being part of that
community. But I didn't take it personally. I was new to the field,
but I was able to figure out which 10% of the literature was worth
paying attention to. The rest was a big waste of trees, but it
didn't interfere with my work.

So, if you work in the PER field, please don't be too insulted by
what I am saying here.

Just a couple of weeks ago we discussed some PER work in which it
was claimed that "according to experts"
a) it was bad practice to keep more than 2 or 3 "significant figures"
in a situation where I think 4 or 5 would have been appropriate; and
b) it was bad practice to keep all the data, and good practice to
throw out "outlier" points ... in the utter absence of any reason
to explain why the outliers were less reliable than the other points.

I'm afraid to ask where they found their "experts".

This was coming from one of the Big Names in the field, and from one
of his students.

This is not an isolated incident. Every so often I go read the PER
literature, and what I find -- almost always -- is page after page of
stuff that cannot possibly be true. If the PER literature told me
that the sun rises in the east, I wouldn't necessarily believe it,
especially if I had any first-hand reason to doubt it (which in fact
I do ... and there's a funny story about that, but it can wait for
another day).

The field is supposed to be about physics, pedagogy, and critical
thinking ... but what I see in the literature is mostly wrong physics,
bad pedagogy, and an astounding lack of critical thinking.

I would trust the intuition of one actual classroom teacher over any
ten PER articles.

I know there are some good people on this list who publish in the
PER literature, and I would encourage you to continue. As the saying
goes: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot
overcome it.

This is tangentially related to the Minkowski discussion, but I'll
leave that for the other thread.
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