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



Here is a link to Stephen Pollock's article, "Longitudinal study of student
conceptual understanding in electricity and magnetism":

http://prst-per.aps.org/abstract/PRSTPER/v5/i2/e020110

The main thrust of this article is to show that AFTER taking one or two
junior-level E&M courses, students score higher on BEMA if they had a
reform intro course, using among other things Washington tutorials. The
reform students' post-junior-E&M BEMA scores were similar to their
post-intro-E&M BEMA scores.

A smaller component of the study looked at BEMA scores just before starting
the first junior-level E&M course, where (reform students only) there was
only a small drop in their BEMA scores from their intro course posttest
scores. Pollock comments:

The small magnitude of this fade is somewhat surprising, the rate loss of
content knowledge measured in typical education-psychology longitudinal
studies for such a long time scale is typically much higher, but the
population studied here is not a broad audience, nor is our test primarily
factual—these are upper-division physics majors tested on physics concepts.
The moderate fade over time for our freshman Tutorial students is
statistically significantly different from zero (a matched, paired 2-sample
t-test yields p=.01). The histogram of the fade is shown in Fig. 4,
demonstrating the average long-term persistence of conceptual understanding.

Of course, the small size of these shifts cannot be characterized by or
attributed solely to introductory pedagogy. The typical physics major’s
educational path between freshman and junior E&M courses includes several
laboratories, a course on modern physics, and classical mechanics, all of
which occasionally touch on topics of electromagnetism.


On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Bruce Sherwood <Bruce_Sherwood@ncsu.edu>wrote:

The references to general issues of retention and forgetting cited in the
Phys. Rev. paper about E&M were these:

N. Slamecka and B. McElree, Normal Forgettinig of Verbal Lists as a
Function of Their Degree of Learning, J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 9,
384 (1983).

J. Wixted and E. Ebbesen, On the form of forgetting, Psychol. Sci. 2, 409
(1991).

Apparently it is well established by experiment that in general forgetting
follows a fairly universal power law. It was naive of us to think that this
trend could be (easily?) opposed by what we hoped was an improved approach
to the material. We did achieve something: a higher level of understanding
to begin with, and therefore a higher level retained after elapsed time.
Presumably this would mean faster relearning when needed.

However, the paper also cites the following reference, with the comment
"It is worth noting here that recent work has shown that better retention
occurs for students exposed to improved pedagogical techniques."

S. J. Pollock, PERC Proceedings, A Longitudinal Study of the Impact of
Curriculum on Conceptual Understanding in E&M, AIP Press, NY, (2008).

Bruce