{"id":5405,"date":"2011-02-14T09:09:21","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T09:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/02\/14\/physics-takes-practice\/"},"modified":"2011-02-14T09:09:21","modified_gmt":"2011-02-14T09:09:21","slug":"physics-takes-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/02\/14\/physics-takes-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"Physics Takes Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Doug Natelson talks about a recent presentation on education<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I recently heard a talk where a well reputed science educator (not naming names) argued that those of us teaching undergraduates need to adapt to the learning habits of “millennials”. That is, these are a group of people who have literally grown up with google (a thought that makes me feel very old, since I went to grad school w\/ Sergei Brin) – they are used to having knowledge (in the form of facts) at their fingertips in a fraction of a second.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I can certainly agree about the Google part– having graded a bunch of preliminary lab reports yesterday, I was really struck by how many of the students opted to Google up a diagram of lab apparatus that was almost but not quite identical to ours, rather than making an accurate diagram for themselves. The more important point, though, is Doug’s response to the expert’s suggestions:<\/p>\n

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While appealing to students’ learning modalities has its place, I contend that this concept simply will not work well in some introductory, foundational classes in the sciences, math, and engineering. Physical science (chemistry, physics) and math are inherently hierarchical. You simply cannot learn more advanced material without mastery of the underpinnings. Moreover, in the case of physics (with which I am most familiar), we’re not just teaching facts (which can indeed be looked up easily on the internet); we’re supposedly teaching analytical skills – how to think like a physicist; how to take a physical situation and translate it into math that enables us to solve for what we care about in terms of what we know. Getting good at this simply requires practice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(See also this SMBC comic<\/a>…)<\/p>\n

I have the same reaction to a lot of talk about “millennial” learning styles and the like. At the end of the day, somebody who is going to leave my institution with a degree saying they have achieved some degree of mastery of a physics needs to be able to solve certain kinds of problems, and the only way to get that ability is through practice. Particularly in the introductory classes, there’s just no way to avoid a certain amount of problem-solving drudgery– you’ve got to work through a whole bunch of mass-suspended-by-wires sorts of problems in order to understand the central techniques.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Of course, problem-solving isn’t everything, either. There’s ample research showing that students who can solve standard homework and exam problems often have a remarkably poor grasp of the concepts behind those problems. This is why we now use tests like the Force Concept Inventory to help assess how we’re doing, and that’s the fundamental motivation behind most of the revised curricula that have gained some popularity in physics.<\/p>\n

The problems-but-not-concepts thing shows up in lots of places, and I think it manifests in some odd ways. I’m pretty sure it’s behind the phenomenon where upperclass physics majors can’t answer questions when they’re tutoring intro students, because they wildly overthink the problems to match whatever they’ve taken most recently. I also suspect this is part of the reason why many physics students and some full-blown physicists– the folks at the Physics Stack Exchange<\/a>— bristle at requests for answers without math. It’s not just that explanations without equations are less precise than explanations in words, it’s also that some people aren’t comfortable enough with the core concepts to do a good job with a non-mathematical explanation. There’s more than a little truth to the cliche that you don’t really understand something until you can explain it to your grandmother– you need a really solid understanding before you can get around the math.<\/p>\n

(Of course, typing this out feels more than a little hubristic, given that I’m in the middle of writing a chapter where I attempt to explain general relativity to my dog. And I will be the first to tell you that I can’t hack the math of general relativity– I almost immediately get lost in the notation. I’ve gone through a big stack of intro textbooks in order to get what feel I have for the subject, and you won’t find me reading Misner, Thorne and Wheeler any time soon… I think I’ve got the idea, but I’m expecting to be savaged by my beta readers when I hit that stage.)<\/p>\n

So, it’s a complicated issue. I’m sure Doug knows this as well– he does note a few times that he’s being deliberately provocative. It’s also one of the things that makes it so damnably difficult to compare teaching across disciplines– you can’t just say “Lecture bad; Discussion good,” because there are contexts where lectures are just about unavoidable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doug Natelson talks about a recent presentation on education: I recently heard a talk where a well reputed science educator (not naming names) argued that those of us teaching undergraduates need to adapt to the learning habits of “millennials”. That is, these are a group of people who have literally grown up with google (a… Continue reading Physics Takes Practice<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[134,13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-course_reports","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}