Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: [Phys-L] Indicators of quality teaching : some necessities



It may be stating the obvious, but it's very difficult to carry out a
meaningful longitudinal study, which surely relates to why you don't see
many examples. In 1996 at Carnegie Mellon Ruth Chabay and I created the
BEMA survey of basic E&M and used it to carry out a longitudinal study of
what students retained up to five semesters after taking the calculus-based
intro E&M course, either the Matter & Interactions flavor or the
traditional flavor. This study, including details of how it was done (which
was not easy), is summarized in section VI of the following paper:

http://prst-per.aps.org/abstract/PRSTPER/v5/i2/e020105

The Matter & Interactions E&M semester made many changes in the content and
in the sequence of topics, changes that we thought might lead to greater
retention because there was an attempt to promote sense-making and provide
a better structure of E&M knowledge. What we found instead was that
although the Matter & Interactions students did better than the traditional
students in all epochs, there was no difference in the retention rates The
Matter & Interactions started out better at the end of the initial semester
and stayed ahead in later (longitudinal) testing, but the rates of fall
were the same for both groups. As the paper says,

The rate of loss in the two groups appeared to be the same, a result
typically found in the experimental
analysis of retention when comparing different initial "degrees of
learning.” (references given)

Note that this longitudinal study only addressed retention of basic E&M
concepts. This was not a study of whether students did better or worse in
later related courses, such as the EE circuits course or the junior level
E&M physics course.

Bruce