10 ms·

Students Ace Textbook Physics While Struggling With Basic Understanding (video)

72 points by vinutheraj 17y ago

tokenadult 17y ago
Eric Mazur is a very thoughtful researcher on effective physics education. See his writings online http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/publications.php?function=searchbyid&author=3 http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/publications.php?function=searc... for articles on physics education from his paradigm-challenging perspective.
stcredzero 17y ago
The headline reminds me of Feynman's account of teaching physics in Rio. Every student could stand and deliver a verbatim retelling of all the definitions in the textbook. They had just covered polarized light. The classroom had a beautiful view of the bay, with sunlight glinting off the water. Feynman asks for and gets a recitation about polarized light, which includes a bit about reflected light being polarized. He then turns towards the window and asks the class for an example of polarized light. The whole class is flummoxed. Everyone could recite, but none of them could apply. EDIT: I remember the day, being a TA for a Comp Sci 101 class, when I realized that a lot of the most vocal and active members of the class were more interested in the mechanics of lectures and tests than the material. It was all a game. I put stuff on the blackboard and in the handouts, and they spit it out on the test sheet. We have become a society of appearances and bureaucratic mechanism. Most college students go through the motions and get their paper, then go home thinking science is just more made up bullshit like politics. These folks laugh when you talk about evolution as reality, and can only reason abstractly at the level of a grade schooler. Many of them graduate, vote, and get promoted to positions of authority.
- dschobel 17y ago
  I'll never forget when I was interviewing a candidate for a junior C# programming position and the conversation went as follows: me: Can you tell me what a delegate is? candidate: <text-book perfect definition, absolutely flawless> me: Great! Can you tell me when you would ever want to use one? candidate: <silence for about 15 seconds> I don't know. It was so bizarre and I still don't fully understand how you can understand the absolutely perfect theoretical definition with having no, literally not one, idea what you're learning.
  - snprbob86 17y ago
    Personally, I simply cannot _recall_ anything unless I understand it at least superficially. I may be able to _remember_ if prompted, but my memory is simply organized around my own definitions and understanding. Maybe us engineering types are hardwired this way. I suspect, however, that non-engineering types aren't wired this way due to poor parenting, weak schools, and fundamentally broken reward and punishment systems.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - CWuestefeld 17y ago
      I simply cannot _recall_ anything unless I understand it at least superficially Me too. That's why the wheels came off my math skills when I got to differential equations. Everything up to that point I'd been able to form a picture of in my head. For example, calculus is just Newtonian mechanics, so that's got a clear analog in the real world. But Diff EQ was just too abstract. I was eventually able to pass it with the help of a couple friends pumping me full of formulas and procedures, but I never really understood, and so I never could really apply it on my own.
      - ShardPhoenix 17y ago
        Differential equations often map to physical scenarios - waves, heat diffusion, etc.
        timwiseman 17y ago
        Very true, they are incredibly useful. But as taught in most class rooms the application is far removed from the instruction. A differential equations class is often not much more than showing some techniques and then assigning numerous quantative problems that use those techniques. So, taking a differential equations class by itself can make it seem abstract and with limited connection to the physical world.
      - 17y ago
- ajb 17y ago
  Sometimes it works the other way round. One professor solved an equation in a class by integrating with respect to pi. The students could not believe their eyes: "You can't do that!", they said; "pi is a constant!". The professor explained that once you have expressed your problem in a formal system like mathematics, you can do anything that is allowed in the rules of that system, even if the intermediate stages make no sense with respect to the original problem, and still obtain a correct answer. [This story is from E T Jaynes 'Probability theory, the logic of science'. But I don't have it to hand, so I may have the details wrong (and I can't remember who the prof was - it wasn't Jaynes).]
- sown 17y ago
  It's absolutely a game. I spent most of my college years doinking around with hacker wargames and trying to hack kernel code, albeit not well. I didn't get graded on that but rather on how well I could put together a resume or whatever. I realized at that time that my "grades" would suffer if I didn't "work" harder at it but I made a conscience decision to hack more. I did as much as was required to graduate and did what I wanted the rest of the time.
- jeromec 17y ago
  > Most college students go through the motions and get their paper, then go home thinking science is just more made up bullshit like politics. But I don't see how anyone can come to a conclusion that "science is just more made up bullshit" when the application of science can be, and has been, practically demonstrated to be accurate, in cases such as sending people to the moon, a lander to mars, and even detonating an atomic bomb.
  - DougBTX 17y ago
    Sending people to the moon and the atomic bomb were as much political as scientific. Without politics, I doubt either would have happened when they did.
    - jeromec 17y ago
      The topic of politics has no bearing whatsoever on my statement of incredulity that any sane person could draw such a conclusion as to think science is bullshit. The text could have read "...thinking science is just more made up bullshit like [Santa Claus]" for all I care.
  - ams6110 17y ago
    I once had a girlfriend who thought that way. Thought that going to the moon was a complete waste of resources because it "made no real difference in anyone's life"
    - jeromec 17y ago
      Whether or not it was a waste of resources is not the point. The point is that science is what made going to the moon possible.
- walkon 17y ago
  These folks laugh when you talk about evolution as reality, and can only reason abstractly at the level of a grade schooler. Since you tossed this subject in, how about folks that disagree with (macro)evolution but have a Ph.D. from MIT and currently work as a Nuclear Research Manager for NASA? http://www.apologeticspress.org/staff/mh http://www.apologeticspress.org/staff/mh I've met this guy and he does not reason like a grade schooler. Also, he noted that many of his colleagues agree with his position regarding origin science.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    how about folks that disagree with (macro)evolution but have a Ph.D. from MIT and currently work as a Nuclear Research Manager for NASA? I followed the link you kindly provided. I see this man's higher education was not majoring in subjects most likely to expose him to the evidence for biological evolution. Nor does the link list any peer-reviewed papers of his on any subject related to the evidence for biological evolution. Macroevolution is a fact http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ in the same sense that nuclear fission is a fact. Neither is routinely directly observed with understanding by laymen, but both sets of facts can be demonstrated by experiment and are consistent with broader bodies of verified scientific knowledge.
    - walkon 17y ago
      I brought him up as an example that there are certainly people out there that don't agree with macro evolution and can reason well beyond that of a "grade schooler." I was not trying to allege that he himself has done any research directly refuting origin evolution. Perhaps if origin evolution could come up with scientific theories that are falsifiable, we'd see more refuting research.
      - tokenadult 17y ago
        I brought him up as an example that there are certainly people out there that don't agree with macro evolution and can reason well beyond that of a "grade schooler." Fair enough. And I brought up the evidence for macroevolution, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ in relation to the main point of the thread-opening submission, to show that college-educated persons with normal curiosity, reading ability, and access to the Internet should be well convinced that macroevolution is a fact, in the same way that nuclear fission is a fact. Perhaps the problem of someone who doubts macroevolution (as, in fact, I was once taught to do) is not a problem of reasoning ability at all, in agreement with you. (I thought my reasoning ability was just fine, and some forms of school testing including the GRE suggested that it was, before I became convinced by the evidence for macroevolution. But I had a crucial lack of curiosity when I wasn't looking up the evidence http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ to use my reasoning ability to evaluate that evidence.) Now I'm curious about the puzzling pattern of upvotes and downvotes here. I think the concern about science education expressed in the thread-opening submission would be a general concern of HN participants, and I would think that a comment that posts a link to a source of reliable scientific conclusions in such a thread would not be considered a detriment to the quality of discussion on HN. Perhaps if origin evolution could come up with scientific theories that are falsifiable, we'd see more refuting research. Demonstrating my curiosity in what I hope is a friendly way, what kind of theories do you have in mind? What would be a way to falsify a theory (from any point of view) about origin of species?
mquander 17y ago
This title was suggested verbatim by JabavuAdams in a recent thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022269 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022269 I think it's slightly unethical to take it word-for-word without giving a hat tip. That said, this is a rather remarkable video if, like me, you don't know much about the theory of education (I showed it to a smart friend who teaches undergraduate literature and he said that it was all old hat to him.) What really stood out to me was the hard data behind Mazur's conclusions -- it's "common sense" that students do better when engaging in the process of learning, but I had never before seen it so convincingly demonstrated.
- vinutheraj 17y ago
  Sorry! I waited a day for you or JabavuAdams to post the link, but since you both didn't do it, I posted it myself, because I felt this was good enough to be posted here !
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
cpr 17y ago
Greatly enjoyed the talk. But, really, taking what he's doing to the limit (he even says so himself) is just re-creating the Socratic method. (Though choosing the questions is hard work, as he notes.) And he can't do that, given his large class sizes (one of my classes at Harvard was 700+ people, Ec 101 with Samuelson from MIT), so he uses this peer-teaching approach to work around the limitation that he can't sit down with a small group of them and work through the questions. That's why we are sending some of our home-educated kids (those that show the interest in and capacity for a rather intense education) to Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, CA. It's probably the only school in the world that uses 100% Socratic method for all courses (each no larger than 17 people), with no electives all 4 years, outside of St. John's of Annapolis/Santa Fe (on which TAC is modeled to some degree). http://www.thomasaquinas.edu http://www.thomasaquinas.edu for those interested. (Yes, it's an unabashedly Catholic school, but that doesn't diminish the intellectual rigor in the least. It's also in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, in the foothills of the mountains north of LA, near Ojai, which is where the 50's film "Shangri-La" was made and which is still a spa/resort area today.)
- jbellis 17y ago
  > It's probably the only school in the world that uses 100% Socratic method for all courses nice > each no larger than 17 people good > with no electives all 4 years wait, wtf? I guess if their curriculum works for your kids, great, but one-size-fits-all isn't a straitjacket I would have been interested in post-high school.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Phillips Exeter Academy http://www.exeter.edu/ http://www.exeter.edu/ arguably has a more discussion-oriented approach to learning, definitely has smaller classes, and has a rich supply of elective classes. And it's for high school-age students rather than for college-age students. We are also a homeschooling family, but we thought long and hard about sending our oldest son to Exeter (which also has great financial aid) before continuing to homeschool him. We may revisit the issue of how to do secondary education with each of our other three children. Our oldest is now applying for colleges--every college on his application list is a research university with strong programs in mathematics and computer science (and, yes, lots of elective course possibilities).
Luc 17y ago
Does anyone know what textbook he's referring to as the one he used as a base for his original lectures? Sounds like 'Weidner and Selz', supposedly out of print? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI#t=22m53s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI#t=22m53s
cabalamat 17y ago
If you can pass the exam without understanding the subject, the exam is badly designed.
- mquander 17y ago
  That's true, but it puts teachers at a post-primary-school level in a real bind. It's hard or impossible to take a subject like physics or calculus (or even algebra, or English literature) and teach it from first principles in a semester or two, especially when most of the students are not very self-motivated or interested a priori in the work. So what do you do when you have a class full of students who have already been basically failed by the system and who understand none of the foundations of your subject? If you fail them all, you're the one that is likely to get the ax, even if it's true that none of them understand your material. Most teachers resign themselves to doing their best and administering fairly traditional tests and classwork, so that hard-working students can pass even with no understanding.
  - cabalamat 17y ago
    You're right, which is why teachers/schools/education authorities shouldn't be setting the exams. The purpose of the exams is (or should be) as much to check that they're doing their job as it is to examine the children.
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      True, but in practice this isn't what happens. What usually happens is that low performing teachers (or school systems) lobby to have the standardized exam watered down. This is a fundamental problem of agency costs. The only people who gain from having a good testing system are the high performing students, and we obviously can't put them in charge.
      - cabalamat 17y ago
        > What usually happens is that low performing teachers (or school systems) lobby to have the standardized exam watered down. In Britain, where the exams have been dumbed down significantly -- see http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-down-and-getting-worse/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-d... or http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-you-eyes-ears-nose-or-mouth/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-yo... -- the main driver has been the ministry of education AFAICT, & their motive seems to be to increase the level of exam passes.
DaniFong 17y ago
For anyone who this video resonates with, I suggest watching the highly entertaining Bollywood hit 3 Idiots, about three mechanical engineering students a a prestigious indian engineering college, struggling against their autocratic principal :-)
aaronsw 17y ago
For people interested in this stuff, Howard Gardner's book _The Unschooled Mind_ collects similar results from every discipline, from computer science to history. http://books.google.com/books?id=DVB1n_KkYEQC http://books.google.com/books?id=DVB1n_KkYEQC For more on CS, of course, you'll want to read http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf
- apu 17y ago
  I've been fairly skeptical of the Camel paper ever since reading Alan Kay's rebuttal: http://www.secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp http://www.secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp I trust Kay much more than these authors on matters of computer science, teaching, or ideas in general.
teeja 17y ago
This is really excellent ... and it makes you think: we (US) used to have one-room schoolhouses where the older kids helped the younger kids. Another thought: a lot of the differences between the prof and students would be removed by physical discovery rather than lecturing. I never liked lectures. What kept me going was talking to people and DOING stuff. And those things I retained for DECADES ... the rest was gone in a year or two.
RK 17y ago
When I was in physics grad school we used the Force Concept Inventory for assessing the intro level physics classes. It was always very interesting and showed that they were able to greatly increase understanding over the course of a few years by focusing on a few areas. I feel that (introductory) physics education has benefited greatly from education research, partly because data can be easily collected and at universities you can adapt and iterate on a semester (or annual) time scale. It would be nice if this model could be adapted to other areas, such as graduate physics, but the normal response is that grad students are supposed to be responsible for their own learning...
nonsequitur 17y ago
The complete "Force Concept Inventory" test (PDF): http://shs.westport.k12.ct.us/physics/2007-2008/FCI-rv95.pdf http://shs.westport.k12.ct.us/physics/2007-2008/FCI-rv95.pdf http://bit.ly/8YeiOZ http://bit.ly/8YeiOZ (mirror)
jmah 17y ago
Slides here: http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/sentFiles/MazurTalk_1516.pdf http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/sentFiles/MazurTalk_1516.pdf

72 points by vinutheraj 17y ago

Eric Mazur is a very thoughtful researcher on effective physics education. See his writings online http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/publications.php?function=searchbyid&author=3 http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/publications.php?function=searc... for articles on physics education from his paradigm-challenging perspective.

stcredzero 17y ago

The headline reminds me of Feynman's account of teaching physics in Rio. Every student could stand and deliver a verbatim retelling of all the definitions in the textbook. They had just covered polarized light. The classroom had a beautiful view of the bay, with sunlight glinting off the water. Feynman asks for and gets a recitation about polarized light, which includes a bit about reflected light being polarized. He then turns towards the window and asks the class for an example of polarized light. The whole class is flummoxed. Everyone could recite, but none of them could apply. EDIT: I remember the day, being a TA for a Comp Sci 101 class, when I realized that a lot of the most vocal and active members of the class were more interested in the mechanics of lectures and tests than the material. It was all a game. I put stuff on the blackboard and in the handouts, and they spit it out on the test sheet. We have become a society of appearances and bureaucratic mechanism. Most college students go through the motions and get their paper, then go home thinking science is just more made up bullshit like politics. These folks laugh when you talk about evolution as reality, and can only reason abstractly at the level of a grade schooler. Many of them graduate, vote, and get promoted to positions of authority.

dschobel 17y ago
I'll never forget when I was interviewing a candidate for a junior C# programming position and the conversation went as follows: me: Can you tell me what a delegate is? candidate: <text-book perfect definition, absolutely flawless> me: Great! Can you tell me when you would ever want to use one? candidate: <silence for about 15 seconds> I don't know. It was so bizarre and I still don't fully understand how you can understand the absolutely perfect theoretical definition with having no, literally not one, idea what you're learning.
- snprbob86 17y ago
  Personally, I simply cannot _recall_ anything unless I understand it at least superficially. I may be able to _remember_ if prompted, but my memory is simply organized around my own definitions and understanding. Maybe us engineering types are hardwired this way. I suspect, however, that non-engineering types aren't wired this way due to poor parenting, weak schools, and fundamentally broken reward and punishment systems.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - CWuestefeld 17y ago
    I simply cannot _recall_ anything unless I understand it at least superficially Me too. That's why the wheels came off my math skills when I got to differential equations. Everything up to that point I'd been able to form a picture of in my head. For example, calculus is just Newtonian mechanics, so that's got a clear analog in the real world. But Diff EQ was just too abstract. I was eventually able to pass it with the help of a couple friends pumping me full of formulas and procedures, but I never really understood, and so I never could really apply it on my own.
    - ShardPhoenix 17y ago
      Differential equations often map to physical scenarios - waves, heat diffusion, etc.
      - timwiseman 17y ago
        Very true, they are incredibly useful. But as taught in most class rooms the application is far removed from the instruction. A differential equations class is often not much more than showing some techniques and then assigning numerous quantative problems that use those techniques. So, taking a differential equations class by itself can make it seem abstract and with limited connection to the physical world.
    - 17y ago
ajb 17y ago
Sometimes it works the other way round. One professor solved an equation in a class by integrating with respect to pi. The students could not believe their eyes: "You can't do that!", they said; "pi is a constant!". The professor explained that once you have expressed your problem in a formal system like mathematics, you can do anything that is allowed in the rules of that system, even if the intermediate stages make no sense with respect to the original problem, and still obtain a correct answer. [This story is from E T Jaynes 'Probability theory, the logic of science'. But I don't have it to hand, so I may have the details wrong (and I can't remember who the prof was - it wasn't Jaynes).]
sown 17y ago
It's absolutely a game. I spent most of my college years doinking around with hacker wargames and trying to hack kernel code, albeit not well. I didn't get graded on that but rather on how well I could put together a resume or whatever. I realized at that time that my "grades" would suffer if I didn't "work" harder at it but I made a conscience decision to hack more. I did as much as was required to graduate and did what I wanted the rest of the time.
jeromec 17y ago
> Most college students go through the motions and get their paper, then go home thinking science is just more made up bullshit like politics. But I don't see how anyone can come to a conclusion that "science is just more made up bullshit" when the application of science can be, and has been, practically demonstrated to be accurate, in cases such as sending people to the moon, a lander to mars, and even detonating an atomic bomb.
- DougBTX 17y ago
  Sending people to the moon and the atomic bomb were as much political as scientific. Without politics, I doubt either would have happened when they did.
  - jeromec 17y ago
    The topic of politics has no bearing whatsoever on my statement of incredulity that any sane person could draw such a conclusion as to think science is bullshit. The text could have read "...thinking science is just more made up bullshit like [Santa Claus]" for all I care.
- ams6110 17y ago
  I once had a girlfriend who thought that way. Thought that going to the moon was a complete waste of resources because it "made no real difference in anyone's life"
  - jeromec 17y ago
    Whether or not it was a waste of resources is not the point. The point is that science is what made going to the moon possible.
walkon 17y ago
These folks laugh when you talk about evolution as reality, and can only reason abstractly at the level of a grade schooler. Since you tossed this subject in, how about folks that disagree with (macro)evolution but have a Ph.D. from MIT and currently work as a Nuclear Research Manager for NASA? http://www.apologeticspress.org/staff/mh http://www.apologeticspress.org/staff/mh I've met this guy and he does not reason like a grade schooler. Also, he noted that many of his colleagues agree with his position regarding origin science.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  how about folks that disagree with (macro)evolution but have a Ph.D. from MIT and currently work as a Nuclear Research Manager for NASA? I followed the link you kindly provided. I see this man's higher education was not majoring in subjects most likely to expose him to the evidence for biological evolution. Nor does the link list any peer-reviewed papers of his on any subject related to the evidence for biological evolution. Macroevolution is a fact http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ in the same sense that nuclear fission is a fact. Neither is routinely directly observed with understanding by laymen, but both sets of facts can be demonstrated by experiment and are consistent with broader bodies of verified scientific knowledge.
  - walkon 17y ago
    I brought him up as an example that there are certainly people out there that don't agree with macro evolution and can reason well beyond that of a "grade schooler." I was not trying to allege that he himself has done any research directly refuting origin evolution. Perhaps if origin evolution could come up with scientific theories that are falsifiable, we'd see more refuting research.
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      I brought him up as an example that there are certainly people out there that don't agree with macro evolution and can reason well beyond that of a "grade schooler." Fair enough. And I brought up the evidence for macroevolution, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ in relation to the main point of the thread-opening submission, to show that college-educated persons with normal curiosity, reading ability, and access to the Internet should be well convinced that macroevolution is a fact, in the same way that nuclear fission is a fact. Perhaps the problem of someone who doubts macroevolution (as, in fact, I was once taught to do) is not a problem of reasoning ability at all, in agreement with you. (I thought my reasoning ability was just fine, and some forms of school testing including the GRE suggested that it was, before I became convinced by the evidence for macroevolution. But I had a crucial lack of curiosity when I wasn't looking up the evidence http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ to use my reasoning ability to evaluate that evidence.) Now I'm curious about the puzzling pattern of upvotes and downvotes here. I think the concern about science education expressed in the thread-opening submission would be a general concern of HN participants, and I would think that a comment that posts a link to a source of reliable scientific conclusions in such a thread would not be considered a detriment to the quality of discussion on HN. Perhaps if origin evolution could come up with scientific theories that are falsifiable, we'd see more refuting research. Demonstrating my curiosity in what I hope is a friendly way, what kind of theories do you have in mind? What would be a way to falsify a theory (from any point of view) about origin of species?

mquander 17y ago

This title was suggested verbatim by JabavuAdams in a recent thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022269 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022269 I think it's slightly unethical to take it word-for-word without giving a hat tip. That said, this is a rather remarkable video if, like me, you don't know much about the theory of education (I showed it to a smart friend who teaches undergraduate literature and he said that it was all old hat to him.) What really stood out to me was the hard data behind Mazur's conclusions -- it's "common sense" that students do better when engaging in the process of learning, but I had never before seen it so convincingly demonstrated.

vinutheraj 17y ago
Sorry! I waited a day for you or JabavuAdams to post the link, but since you both didn't do it, I posted it myself, because I felt this was good enough to be posted here !
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

cpr 17y ago

Greatly enjoyed the talk. But, really, taking what he's doing to the limit (he even says so himself) is just re-creating the Socratic method. (Though choosing the questions is hard work, as he notes.) And he can't do that, given his large class sizes (one of my classes at Harvard was 700+ people, Ec 101 with Samuelson from MIT), so he uses this peer-teaching approach to work around the limitation that he can't sit down with a small group of them and work through the questions. That's why we are sending some of our home-educated kids (those that show the interest in and capacity for a rather intense education) to Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, CA. It's probably the only school in the world that uses 100% Socratic method for all courses (each no larger than 17 people), with no electives all 4 years, outside of St. John's of Annapolis/Santa Fe (on which TAC is modeled to some degree). http://www.thomasaquinas.edu http://www.thomasaquinas.edu for those interested. (Yes, it's an unabashedly Catholic school, but that doesn't diminish the intellectual rigor in the least. It's also in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, in the foothills of the mountains north of LA, near Ojai, which is where the 50's film "Shangri-La" was made and which is still a spa/resort area today.)

jbellis 17y ago
> It's probably the only school in the world that uses 100% Socratic method for all courses nice > each no larger than 17 people good > with no electives all 4 years wait, wtf? I guess if their curriculum works for your kids, great, but one-size-fits-all isn't a straitjacket I would have been interested in post-high school.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Phillips Exeter Academy http://www.exeter.edu/ http://www.exeter.edu/ arguably has a more discussion-oriented approach to learning, definitely has smaller classes, and has a rich supply of elective classes. And it's for high school-age students rather than for college-age students. We are also a homeschooling family, but we thought long and hard about sending our oldest son to Exeter (which also has great financial aid) before continuing to homeschool him. We may revisit the issue of how to do secondary education with each of our other three children. Our oldest is now applying for colleges--every college on his application list is a research university with strong programs in mathematics and computer science (and, yes, lots of elective course possibilities).

Luc 17y ago

Does anyone know what textbook he's referring to as the one he used as a base for his original lectures? Sounds like 'Weidner and Selz', supposedly out of print? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI#t=22m53s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI#t=22m53s

cabalamat 17y ago

If you can pass the exam without understanding the subject, the exam is badly designed.

mquander 17y ago
That's true, but it puts teachers at a post-primary-school level in a real bind. It's hard or impossible to take a subject like physics or calculus (or even algebra, or English literature) and teach it from first principles in a semester or two, especially when most of the students are not very self-motivated or interested a priori in the work. So what do you do when you have a class full of students who have already been basically failed by the system and who understand none of the foundations of your subject? If you fail them all, you're the one that is likely to get the ax, even if it's true that none of them understand your material. Most teachers resign themselves to doing their best and administering fairly traditional tests and classwork, so that hard-working students can pass even with no understanding.
- cabalamat 17y ago
  You're right, which is why teachers/schools/education authorities shouldn't be setting the exams. The purpose of the exams is (or should be) as much to check that they're doing their job as it is to examine the children.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    True, but in practice this isn't what happens. What usually happens is that low performing teachers (or school systems) lobby to have the standardized exam watered down. This is a fundamental problem of agency costs. The only people who gain from having a good testing system are the high performing students, and we obviously can't put them in charge.
    - cabalamat 17y ago
      > What usually happens is that low performing teachers (or school systems) lobby to have the standardized exam watered down. In Britain, where the exams have been dumbed down significantly -- see http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-down-and-getting-worse/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-d... or http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-you-eyes-ears-nose-or-mouth/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-yo... -- the main driver has been the ministry of education AFAICT, & their motive seems to be to increase the level of exam passes.

DaniFong 17y ago

For anyone who this video resonates with, I suggest watching the highly entertaining Bollywood hit 3 Idiots, about three mechanical engineering students a a prestigious indian engineering college, struggling against their autocratic principal :-)

aaronsw 17y ago

For people interested in this stuff, Howard Gardner's book _The Unschooled Mind_ collects similar results from every discipline, from computer science to history. http://books.google.com/books?id=DVB1n_KkYEQC http://books.google.com/books?id=DVB1n_KkYEQC For more on CS, of course, you'll want to read http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf

apu 17y ago
I've been fairly skeptical of the Camel paper ever since reading Alan Kay's rebuttal: http://www.secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp http://www.secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp I trust Kay much more than these authors on matters of computer science, teaching, or ideas in general.

teeja 17y ago

This is really excellent ... and it makes you think: we (US) used to have one-room schoolhouses where the older kids helped the younger kids. Another thought: a lot of the differences between the prof and students would be removed by physical discovery rather than lecturing. I never liked lectures. What kept me going was talking to people and DOING stuff. And those things I retained for DECADES ... the rest was gone in a year or two.

RK 17y ago

When I was in physics grad school we used the Force Concept Inventory for assessing the intro level physics classes. It was always very interesting and showed that they were able to greatly increase understanding over the course of a few years by focusing on a few areas. I feel that (introductory) physics education has benefited greatly from education research, partly because data can be easily collected and at universities you can adapt and iterate on a semester (or annual) time scale. It would be nice if this model could be adapted to other areas, such as graduate physics, but the normal response is that grad students are supposed to be responsible for their own learning...

nonsequitur 17y ago

The complete "Force Concept Inventory" test (PDF): http://shs.westport.k12.ct.us/physics/2007-2008/FCI-rv95.pdf http://shs.westport.k12.ct.us/physics/2007-2008/FCI-rv95.pdf http://bit.ly/8YeiOZ http://bit.ly/8YeiOZ (mirror)

jmah 17y ago

Slides here: http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/sentFiles/MazurTalk_1516.pdf http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/sentFiles/MazurTalk_1516.pdf