Here’s a wonderful tidbit from a book that every physics teacher should have — The Flying Circus of Physics.  My old mentor PD gave it to me with the inscription, “until I write my book of physics stories, this is the best collection of science stories in print.”  As much as I love Paul, I think even he’d have a big task to outdo the wide array of stories and strange facts in this book (though I’d love to see him try!).  Need something to spice up a lecture on sound?  How about an explanation of why we hear our upstairs neighbors more than they hear us?  Or need a story to make the idea of pressure come alive?  How about the girl who got her tongue stuck in a bottle and needed glass cutters to help her get free?

So here’s the story of how electricity helps flowers grow.  We generally think of pollination as being a sort of accidental process — the bee gets himself all covered in yellow snow at one flower, and then loses some of it at the next flower.  No, it turns out that bees get positively charged (they lose some electrons) as they fly through the air.  When the positive bee approaches the neutral flower, that induces a charge in the pollen, which jumps onto the bee.

This is the same phenomenon as when you rub a balloon on your sweater.  The balloon becomes positively charged and when you bring it to the wall, it induces a charge in the wall.  Thus, it sticks to the wall.  There’s a nice simulation of this effect here.

Anyway, the pollen sticks to the hairs on the bee.  If it stuck to the bee itself, it would lose its charge.  The hair acts as an insulator, keeping the pollen grain just far enough away to keep it charged, and thus attracted to the bee.

Now, when the bee goes to the next flower, it induces a negative charge in the stigma of that flower.  The pollen grains are more strongly affected by that concentrated negative charge (the stigma, after all, has more charge than the bee, it’s connected to the ground so has an infinite source of electrons to draw from), and the pollen grain is polarized in the opposite way and jumps to the flower.

Wow.  I wonder if pollination doesn’t work as well in moist climates, then?  Is that why Colorado wildflowers are so stunning in their concentrations?

Bee Picture from TTaylor

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The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has been experimenting with using podcasts in their nursing courses, though it was four years ago so things might have changed.  They discovered several things along the way:

Students needed to be educated that they could listen to podcasts on any MP3 player or on their computer (and did not need an iPod).  Most listened to them on their computer.  How did they use the podcasts?  Did they use them to review, or as a substitute for attending class?  86% used them as a review, and only 14% used them instead of going to class.  These are consistent with other studies.  Most (79%) used them at home, as opposed to at the gym or on their commute.  So, they’re not using them as “mobile learning” per se, they’re sitting at their computer to listen to them, for the most part.  Also, they downloaded the podcasts as soon as they were available (51%) as opposed to right before the exam (12%).  Other studies, she said, have found that only 40% download immediately, and 60% later or before the exam.  Some preferred the audio podcast because it was easier, but a few students said they preferred having the powerpoint slides along with the audio.  These survey results are at www.uccs.edu/bethel.

It may be that recording the student lecture isn’t the best use of student time, to re-listen to the whole lecture.  However, most people are podcasting the entire lecture.  Some students specifically seek out courses where podcasts are being used.

Podcasts can be helpful in the following ways, found some studies:

• clarifying difficult concepts
• reviewing concepts
• repetition of material
• helping with note taking
• preparing for exams
• catching up on missed classes
• ESL students who need to repeat words

Lessons learned

• Check disk space and batteries before class
• Repeat student questions
• Start each ’segment’ of the lecture with a title
• Create multiple short files (15-20 minutes) as opposed to entire lectures
• Archive previously recorded lectures in case the current one has technical difficulties
• Ownership issues can be sticky.  Careful of using images from textbooks because you’re then distributing copyrighted content.
• One idea is to record the lecture in advance (though some faculty complain that this feels stilted without an audience) and require students to listen to it in advance.  Then use classtime for discussion.  Some instructors have found this to be a great alternative to the traditional class lecture.

I’ve been trying to figure out for myself what I think of podcasted lectures.  I could see it being helpful when you’ve spaced out for a moment, to go back and review what the instructor said.  It’s an alternative reference, like the textbook.  But it also seems that it requires a relatively sophisticated student to use such a resource to enhance their learning.  Learning doesn’t happen by transmission, and a freshman might think she’s studying by just listening to the lecture again.  They need to be going to the content with a purpose, to try to understand the material or answer a specific question or fill in their notes, I think.  I could imagine the podcasts being even more helpful with some sort of guiding questions to direct students’ engagement with the podcasts.

How did they do it?

• Used portable digital recorders (Olympus; $~70) which can record up to 6 hours and are easy to use.  However, the file then needed to be compressed to MP3 using Audacity ($free).
• They eventually started using the Zoom H2 recorder ($199), which records directly to MP3 and has omnidirectional recording (allowing students to hear their questions during class, not just the instructor).  They’re very pleased with this recorder.
• It’s been difficult to get instructors to break up their lectures into different segments.  Recordings of 15-20 minutes would be ideal.
• In the course website gave students instructions on how to download the podcasts from iTunes
• They then upgraded to Leopard and, with quite a bit of difficulty, got Podcast Producer configured.  Apparently the new Podcast Producer II will avoid many of the difficulties that they experienced, especially regarding workflows.
• They are also now going to iTunes U, but for now have just been using a “subscribe in iTunes” link on the course website (which is a wiki/blog site).  Each entry in the blog is a new audio file, but there is also a subscription link.

I would be interested to hear about iTunes U from people who have been using it.  I don’t quite understand what it is other than a central depot for university/education related podcasts?

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Today’s session is about pre-service and in-service teacher training

There is very little research to direct teacher training programs, which are treated as practical programs, and even less in physics.  A lot of work has been done in what’s called “pedagogical content knowledge” or “PCK” — you can see my previous posts here and here from last year’s AAPT.  There is little documentation on most of the teacher preparation programs, with notable exceptions of Etkina’s and McDermott’s programs to teach physics teachers, and the modeling courses.  This lack of documentation has made it difficult to extract essential features of “what makes a good teacher preparation program” since there are so many holes in the literature and research we can’t do meta-analysis.

Gay Stewart talkeda bout how her physics department got involved with local school districts, and got to know the teachers and gain their respect.  But it depended strongly on the particular school district and the power structure in each district.  Local teachers were able to tell her who she should talk to in order to get traction in the district.

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This session is about how we prepare our undergraduates for graduate school — what to consider, and how we’re doing.

One thing to consider, in thinking about the goals of our undergraduate majors, is that we actually don’t want to prepare all of our undergraduates for graduate school.  Physics is a liberal arts degree, allowing students a broad education that is relevant for many careers.  Many employers need students who are good problem-solvers, for a wide variety of jobs.

If they do want t go on to graduate school, however, they should be aware that graduate work is a loooong apprenticeship, with an emphasis on research.  About half of graduate students finish their PhD within 6 years.  To boot,  they’re not likely to get academic jobs — the odds are long.  About 60% of physics jobs (for PhDs) are in the private sector, and only about 30% in academia.  And it’s tough to stick with it – some schols have a 80% attrition rate!  So, should we send all our students to graduate school when there is such a high rate of “failure”?

But, if a student does want to get a PhD, they should know that to be successful in graduate school you need to really love physics, and be persisent.  And be able to do the work (do the math, have scientific creativity), and be able to deal with frustration.  The AAPT has a nice guide for students considering a PhD in physics.

Ken Heller spoke at more length about what a student needs to do to be successful in graduate school:

1. Move away from a student mentality to a more professional attitude (responsibility, working in groups, good communication skills, as well as independent work).
2. Problem solving skills — Such as being able to work from first principles or know when that’s not possible, not expecting problems to have unique solutions, making decisions instead of just knowing how to do it, carry out complex solutions in a logical matter, document the steps towards the solution and evaluate the final answer.  A lot of graduate students are traumatized when they’re asked to do something they don’t know how to do!  Of course, success in this area requires that students have some idea about how they learn and what they don’t know… which we know they’re not very good at.
3. Know your physics, of course.  Common principles and techniques in multiple physics topics and the interconnectedness between those topics.  Why do we use the representations and techniques that we do?

I think that a lot of these aspects of graduate student training are, indeed, addressed by our own work at the University of Colorado to transform our upper division classes to more explicitly teach some of the concepts and skills by using interactive techniques where students need to communicate their ideas to each other.  If you want more information on that work, you can visit this site. I’ll be uploading our new paper and my AAPT talk there shortly.

Another thing that helps students develop these skills, once they’re in graduate school, are teaching experiences (eg., TA-ship) and apprentice-ships.  Undergraduates can also get such teaching experience (see for example the learning assistant program at CU), which is invaluable in helping them learn the material as well as understanding how people learn effectively.  Explicit problem-solving instruction, said Dr. Heller, is also very important.  Students don’t pick this up naturally, rather the logical appraoch to solving new problems needs to be taught directly.  (However, I know that there has been some doubt cast on the usefulness of the whole plan-implement-evaluate problem solving cycle.  That’s not really how experts solve problems, that’s how we solve exercises… though I asked that question of Dr. Heller and he claims that this expert-like problem solving method is not controversial — his colleagues say that they solve problems that way.)

What about research experiences? This was the subject of Dr. Yennello’s talk. Students get technical and problem solving skills from doing research as undergraduates, but even more important, they learn many aspects of working on big problems — many of the items mentioned by previous speakers, such as dealing with frustration, time management, communication, collaboration, as well as leadership and self-confidence.

A study by SRI did a long term study of undergraduates involved in research. Dr. Yennello claimed this study had a lot of good messages — students involved in undergraduate research learned a lot of good skills.  I don’t disagree totally, however, I notice that almost all the survey answers got positive responses from students… they agreed that they learned good things (“I understod the nature of a job of a researcher”) and disagreed with negative statements (like, “I learned that research is not for me.”)  I wonder how many students were trying to say good things about an experience where they felt others were doing something to help them. Plus, these were all self-reports — these are things that the undergraduates felt that they were gaining.  What did they actually gain?  Interesting, more students indicated they thought they would go for the PhD after this experience than beforehand.

However, in order to create a good experience for undergraduates, it takes a committment of time and energy to mentor these students.  I’m thinking of my own REU experience, where I was supervised by a graduate student.  She was supportive at first, but then became frustrated with what she perceived as a lack of effort on my part to answer my own questions.  I think there was a lot that I didn’t know, and also I hadn’t been taught how to solve new problems.  I was one of those “A” students who followed the rules and did well.  She snapped at me towards the end, when I asked how to go about a particular analysis, “I think you know how to do that.”  I didn’t, and stared at the screen in tears while she worked in angry silence next to me, ignoring my sniffles.  She didn’t help me figure out how to solve my problem, and admonished me for not knowing.  That’s a terrible way to encourage anyone in science, especially women.  I definitely didn’t come out of that experience feeling any sort of confidence in my abilities as a scientist or researcher.  Too bad. 

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Teaching in Urban Schools – Katya Denisova – Science Coordinator, Baltimore Public Schools.

This was a talk about factors to consider when teaching science in schools with high poverty levels.  Baltimore has a large poverty rate (30% of kids under 18 live in poverty if I understood her statistic right, though that seems high), and a large African American population.  Many students move during their high school career, and only 63% of seniors will graduate.  Wow.

How can we teach physics to this student population?  How do we help teachers with good content knowledge develop the pedagogy to teach effectively in this environment?  Of the 34 teachers with a certification in physics (compared to 214 in biology), only 12 are actually teaching physics, half of which are in magnet schools.  And 21 of those teachers are from the Philippines, and only 7 from the U.S.  This is a somewhat bleak picture — there are not many physics educators in the school, there are not many resources for teaching physics, parents are not involved in students’ science learning,  students are not motivated and teachers are not qualified.

The “pedagogy of poverty” is a style of teaching that keeps kids under control with a lot of didactic teaching and directed activities.  It’s not necessarily that effective at helping kids learn, but the kids are well organized.  It’s typical of urban settings.  Below is from Haberman’s article of that same title:

“The teaching acts that constitute the core functions of urban teaching are:
giving information,
asking questions,
giving directions,
making assignments,
monitoring seatwork,
reviewing assignments,
giving tests,
reviewing tests,
assigning homework,
reviewing homework,
settling disputes,
punishing noncompliance,
marking papers, and
giving grades.”

Here’s a blog post from a teacher who seemed to have a bit of an epiphany when she read that article.

“Miss C, do you know everything?” “How come you’re so smart?” … And though I usually kept a straight face (with difficulty), I was delighted at this response. I thought it was cute that they thought I was some kind of omniscient being, instead of just a teacher. … But through the lens of this article, I can see that all the dispensing of knowledge on my end intimidated my students. How could they hope to know as much as I do? Teachers are for telling you things, interesting and boring, and students’ jobs are for listening and behaving.

Some studies have been done on how to teach effectively in an African American classroom.

1. Students have low academic self esteem SO make a warm fun accepting learning environment with low competition
2. Students like tasks with human issues SO use scientists’ biographies and stories
3. Students like kinesthetic and visual learning SO use hands on appraoches
4. Students are vocal SO encourage them to talk about science
5. Students believe that people and things are connected SO teach the Big Picture of science (and include religion)

Though, of course, I balk when I hear someone say “People in X group are Y.”  Still, these generalizations can help direct our teaching strategies.   She’s found that students really have fun doing hands-on activities, using card games, motion analysis programs, balloon rockets, etc.  They’re going to try adopting Physics First… which should be an interesting experiment.

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Our education research group here at University of Colorado had a visit and a very interesting talk by Sanjoy Mahajan, director of the teaching and learning laboratory at MIT and former physics professor, last semester.  He focuses on understanding and improving students number sense, mostly through use of approximations and estimations.  He’s a very provocative fellow.  Here are some highlights from his message to us.

There are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship.  How old is the captain?

That was a question given to 2nd and 3rd graders in France back in the late 1970’s.  The answer, of course, is 36.  Or at least so stated most of the children who answered it.  Here’s an interesting writeup from a researcher who reports on several variations on that original experiment, with odd and disturbing results.  Children argued that the number of the flock determined the age of the shepherd, and if members of the flock ran away, then that affected the shepherd’s age!  Do click on that link above, it’s very interesting.  One of the researchers whose work he discusses said:

The students he interviewed not only failed to note the meaninglessness of the problems as stated but went ahead blithely to combine the numbers given in the problems and produce answers. They could only do so by engaging in what might be called suspension of sense-making – suspending the requirement that the way in which the problems are stated makes sense … There is reason to believe that such suspension of sense-making develops in school, as a result of schooling.

Here is another example, from Sanjoy Mahajan, about a lack of number sense.  In a national assessment of mathematics ability, students 13 and 17 years old were asked:

Estimate 3.04 x 5.3

It’s even easier than you think.  They were given a set of answer choices:

A) 1.6

B) 16

C) 160

D) 1600

E) No answer

Here are the responses of the students, 13 year olds and 17 year olds

A) 1.6        28% 21%

B) 16           21% 37%

C) 160        18% 17%

D) 1600      28% 11%

E) No answer 9% 12%

The conclusion I draw from this?  We’re doomed.  I mean, the 17-year olds did a little better than the 13 year olds, but not that much.  And get this!  70% of those students could correctly do the algorithmical multiplication problem. This isn’t a problem of multiplication.  It’s a deeper problem of not understanding our number system.

Students just wander around in a random walk in solution space, he says, until they get something that looks like an answer. And they put a box around it.  We’d rather, of course, that they have a guide, a sort of nose for where they should go in solving the problem.  Then a path to the solution will be more direct.  But that requires understanding, rather than rote learning.  Rote learning, believes Sanjay, is an evil thing to be eradicated from our learning system.  Not everyone in our group agreed.

In another example he gave, he demonstrated how much more comfortable students are with algorithmical numerical calculations than with other solution methods.  Even when a graph was right in front of them, demonstrating the answer to the question, they ground through the calculation.  Sanjay argues this shows a lack of reasoning and understanding.  Students have been taugh that numbers are a more valid way of reasoning, and that this is what teachers are looking for in answers, rather than pictures and graphs.

Or, how about this one.  You drop a ball on the table and it bounces.  What are the forces on the ball at the moment that it’s stationary on the table?  Think about it a moment.

Did you answer “mg”?  That’s what most students answer.  We’re so used to the normal force being equal to mg when items are stationary.  So, Sanjay has his students put out their hand on the table.  He places a rock on their hand.

Sanjay: What’s the force of the rock on your hand?

Student:  mg

OK, no problem.  Now he holds the rock above their hand and makes as if to drop it.

Sanjay:  Hey, why are you moving your hand?

He places the rock again on their hand.  “That’s what mg feels like.  Why are you afraid of mg?”

OK, so they decide it must not be mg.  It must be, maybe, 2mg.  That seems plausible, given all those momentum conservation problems they’ve done.  So he puts two rocks on their hand.  That’s 2mg. That still feels OK.  So it must be more than 2 mg.

Now that they have that physical intuition, he says, they’re ready to see the symbolic manipulation.

Here’s the answer as he described it.  Acceleration goes as the velocity of impact divided by the time of contact.  What is the time of contact?  The bottom of the ball hits the ground, but the top keeps going until it gets the signal that the bottom has hit, that there’s no more room to move down, and it’s time to start moving up.  That happens at the speed of sound.

So

Conclusion:  Ouch

Sanjay argued that doing this kind of qualitative reasoning is both a diagnostic tool (to see if students have understood you), a treatment (to get students thinking qualitatively) and fun. This gives students a tool to understand and estimate numbers in any problem, not just physics.  He wants them to have a feel for what’s going on before they start plugging in numbers.

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This is part 3 of an ongoing set of posts about using clickers in upper division physics courses, as we’ve been doing at U. Colorado for several years.

Arguments against using clickers in upper division

We’ve heard plenty of arguments about why people don’t want to use clickers in the upper division. Here are a few (with our answers):

• It chews up time. Yes, it’s true, it does. But these ideas are complex! And if students walk away with the few key ideas from class and really get them, then that’s a valuable use of class time.
• Students are sophisticated learners at the junior level and don’t need this technological tool to help them learn. Yes, it’s true, they are sophisticated learners, and can go home and read the book if they don’t “get” the lecture. But we’re using clickers as a tool to aid their learning, and because they’re more sophisticated learners, they can get a lot more out of the use of that tool and peer discussion.
• Discussion is easy in small classes, we don’t need clickers. Some instructors do use other methods, such as colored cards, in small classes. The technology itself may not be as crucial, but the teaching method (of asking a question and encouraging students to discuss it with their neighbors) is still incredibly powerful. Plus, students can still “hide” in a class of 10. Or even a class of five. And so can their misconceptions. Students may think that they are following, but until they have to answer a challenging question, they may not be aware of difficulties that they have.
• Students may resist the use of clickers. That’s what happened in one class at CU, but the next semester, when clickers were used in that class, students saw the value they added.
• It’s some extra effort for faculty. Yes, but we do have some question banks available for you at CU if you would like to try it.

Why use clickers?

Besides, clickers work. We have lots of data showing that peer discussion works — see for example the recent paper in Science by Michelle Smith et al. Below are some results from my own work in junior E&M I, when clickers were added to the course. That was only one of a set of changes, however, so it’s hard to tease out whether clickers were a major component, though it was certainly the one that students had the most contact with.

Our end of term surveys also show that students find the use of clickers useful and recommend them in upper division courses. See the powerpoint slides to see all that data.

One interesting piece of that story is that students in quantum mechanics, taught by a popular but traditional lecturer, didn’t want to see clickers added to the course. They said things like:

The class is small enough that if you don’t understand something you can ask the professor to clarify.

I feel that with clicker questions, the class would “feel” more like a lower division course.

The lecture style was extremely useful. NO CLICKERS!

The data reflected their concerns — they didn’t recommend that clickers be used in upper division courses. But the same instructor taught roughly the same course the next semester (different students, but same instructor and same course) with clickers. Those students were enthusiastic about the use of clickers, and strongly recommended using them in upper division courses. So, students may not be able to predict the value of clickers when they haven’t seen them used in an upper division course yet.

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I recently gave a talk at the AAPT about how we’re using clickers in upper division physics, and I keep meaning to include this as a post here! I wonder, should I submit this to The Physics Teacher, perhaps?

First off, you can download my powerpoint, as well as the accompanying videos, here. There are a whole bunch of different resources on clickers (clicker banks, videos in progress, useful links) at that website as well (http://STEMclickers.colorado.edu) and on my YouTube channel.

Clickers in the Upper Division 

Some people disagree with the use of clickers at the upper division (or even in the lower division). We find them incredibly valuable as a tool to engage students so they get (a) to talk to their peers, (b) get feedback on their performance in a private way, and (c) the instructor gets instant feedback on what the class is understanding. We typically ask a question, then ask students to discuss it with their neighbors to convince each other of their answer. They click in and we discuss the question as a class. I’ll write a post in more detail about clickers later, but if you want to know more, go to Derek Bruff’s blog, or take a look at his excellent book Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments. He also has some resources posted here.

You can see more recommendations on books on clickers at my sciencegeekgirl picks page.

Using clickers in the upper division is a little bit controversial. Many faculty disagreed with our choice to use clickers at this level, and still do despite the data showing that it was an effective way to teach. There is a sense that clickers are “babying” the students, or not serious.

The history of upper division clickers at CU

We’ve been using clickers in the upper division at CU since 2004 in classes from Stat Mech, to Classical Mech, to E&M and Quantum, plus one graduate course (AMO) — a total of 26 classes and 10 courses. This hasn’t just been the work of Physics Education Research (PER) faculty — it’s been a real mix of PER and non-PER. One thing to note is that, with just two exceptions, faculty had taught an introductory course using clickers before they used it in the upper division.

We’ve been working on transforming two of our courses in particular, to be more interactive — junior level Quantum I and E&M I. Let’s look at Quantum I. This is typically taken by 2nd semester juniors, and is currently in its third semester of transformations. It was co-taught by a PER instructor (and expert clicker user), Steven Pollock, and a non-PER instructor (new open-minded clicker user), Oliver DeWolfe, this last semester.

Let’s see how this looked in action — here is a video showing Steve using clickers in this quantum class, students talking about what they got out of it, and Oliver discussing whether he thought clickers were a good thing.

Download this video as a .mov

Coming in future posts this week — what kinds of questions we ask in the upper division, what students think, and tips for success!

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photo by swanskalot - flickr

I was just pointed to this wonderful essay about the importance of stupidity in scientific research (Martin Schwartz, Journal of Cell Science).  It’s a short and wonderful little essay, and points out what it is that is so satisfying about scientific research — and what makes it so hard.  And how so many students are somewhat misled as to this fact — they’re used to feeling smart, and so may leave the sciences because they feel dumb.  As an interesting side note, the story the author starts out with is that of a woman leaving the field because she feels stupid all the time.  I, myself, am a woman who left physics because it seemed like the men knew more than me, it just wasn’t “easy” enough for me.  I wonder, is the stupidity problem perhaps more damaging to women than to men?

Here’s a pertinent paragraph from the essay, which gave me a little “a-hah” moment right now, years after my PhD!

I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It’s a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.

…

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

A commenter (John Clement, Houston TX) commented on the listserv where this was posted:

One problem with science is that it may seem to be very simple, because it is generally taught early on in a very didactive fashion.  But later on it is only accessible when you are willing to acknowledge the confusion, and work through it.  This is expecially true in physics.  Other subjects may be more attractive because this may not be as evident early on.  History is
often acknowledged to be confusing, and students expect this.  Math on the other hand is so rigidly taught that students who can not tolerate confusion will choose it over science.  Students tend to think that science is rigid, and that is part of the problem with our educational system.

I suspect that many students leave science when they begin to encounter significant confusion.  Often they have had success, and did not experience confusion in previous courses.

Of course, there is the flip side of the coin — if it’s too easy, you get bored, and don’t learn either.  Below is a graph of optimum “flow” (by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) illustrating this concept:

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One of our main messages here at the Science Education Initiative is that it’s important that teachers both find out what their students difficulties are, and then choose their instructional strategies accordingly.

That sounds easy, but for the average college faculty (facing a sea of 200 faces) or the average K12 teacher (who has to prepare a lesson every single day), this becomes a huge and sometimes insurmountable task to do on your own.

So, I was curious at a recent conference to find out about a tool — Diagnoser — which purports to do this work for you.  Here’s the basic idea:

The website has assessments for your students, based on what the National Standards say they should learn.  These serve as formative assessment, to inform teachers what their students already know.  Students get feedback as they do the tests and, even better, teachers can get reports on their students performance.  But those reports don’t just tell teachers what students did right and wrong, but it actually diagnoses what students errors in thinking are, and gives teachers instructional strategies for correcting these misconceptions.

Sounds great in theory, but I wonder how it does in practice?  Rhett at dotphysics said it was good for what it is, but there was some limitation (and I’m blanking on what that was).  I’d be curious to hear from anyone using this tool.

Diagnoser currently has a lot in Physical Science (Force, Motion, Sound and Waves, Properties of Matter), plus the Human Body System in Life Sciences.

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