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Re: [Phys-l] Lack of rigor: low increase in crit. thinking



John Denker appears to have been the type of student who sees something once, understands it, and further practicing with it is "busy work." I haven't seen many students who are that way, although I don't doubt they exist. I certainly agree that extra "practice" at some point becomes "busy work" and I try to find a happy medium between sufficient work and busy work.

Since we can't teach every student one-on-one, we have to work with averages. The idea that a 3-hour course should require about 6 hours of outside-of-class study/work/practice is an average. Some students can achieve the course goals with much less time on task, and some students require much more time on task. For the most part, the students I work with who are not getting it are not spending sufficient time on task. This might be because they just aren't bright, or it might be because they have holes in their backgrounds that need filled before they can appreciate the material at hand. The idea that a professor could say, "Useful, Know it" would be sufficient to motivate students to spend whatever time it takes (5 minutes or 5 hours) to "know it" would be a nice way to teach. And it might actually work if those students who don't get it would flunk out, and know they will flunk out if they don't spend the requisite time (for them) to "know it." In general, for the crop of students I have, if I taught that way, and then flunked the students who didn't get it, I'd be sitting in the dean's office trying to defend why I still think I should be employed as a professor.

I don't want to give mountains of homework, but I need to give enough representative problems of sufficient depth and breadth so students who do the problems will probably end up understanding the material. If I don't overdo it, the students who caught on right away will not spend 6 hours out of class for a 3-credit class. But some students will need to spend more than 6 hours. And some students will need to spend somewhere around 6 hours out of class, per week, on-task, assuming I have average students, and I am moving at a reasonable pace, and I am assigning a reasonable amount of work.

John, how do you feel about your airplane pilot students? Once they have had a successful take off, and a successful landing, are they done? Is everything else busy work?


Michael D. Edmiston, PhD.
Professor of Chemistry and Physics
Chair, Division of Natural and Applied Sciences
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
Office 419-358-3270
Cell 419-230-9657