26 ms·
With proof or not, it's very hard to convince anyone of anything they don't want to believe. It's generally not fun to acknowledge that you're wrong. When you'
by paulcole 2y ago
With proof or not, it's very hard to convince anyone of anything they don't want to believe.
It's generally not fun to acknowledge that you're wrong. When you're convinced something that you like is true it's even harder to accept an alternate viewpoint (even a valid one).
Most people can acknowledge that vegetables are good for them even if they don't eat them, for example. But it's much harder to get people to admit that the thing they love is provably false.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoAlso, not all proof is good. E.g. these date come from one physics class doing this experiment once. Are these good data? I’m not sure if this is an effective sample size as these estimates haven’t been performed afaik. What is the variance in the population? Who knows. Accepting some data just because its some data is just as bad as believing something on faith alone. It kind of is just that in fact.
- aidenn0 2y agoSample size was 149 students, difference in test results was 0.46σ with a P<0.001 This is an absurdly large effect for a social-science result, so I too would like to see this replicated. Leaving half a standard-deviation of results on the table would be an extreme failure of pedagogy. In addition, the study mentions that a typical lecture for students was semi-interactive, so it would be nice to see the AL method compared with the existing one (rather than a completely passive control), presuming that the semi-interactive classes are more palatable to the students, it might be a good "sweet spot"
- kjkjadksj 2y agoAt the same time they limited it to a harvard calculus based physics class using the "regular instructors approach used for years" so one professor teaching calc based physics at harvard. Its making an assumption that this would work for every other academic setting and that there isn't some bias inherent with either the teacher, the coursework, or even the student body of harvard which is arguably more selective than a lot of other student bodies. Does this even hold water for other physics classes at harvard? I seem to remember from my own schooling quite a lot of variance between different professors exam scores on the same exact course in the same exact semester, something rectified with a huge curve at the end of the semester. In other words, maybe this professor is just a terrible lecturer. We don't have very strong evidence to say one way or another about the applicability of this study to the general population of students, I don't think.
- aidenn0 2y agoCorrection: Two professors teaching non-honors mechanics at Harvard. Authors' claim that using the non-honors course filtered out the "most well-prepared" students. The class appears to count as credit towards a physics degree and 1/3 of the class went on to pursue a physics degree. Sure it's calculus-based, but non-calculus based mechanics is, IMO, educational malpractice at the collegiate level. You can do a qualitative approach to mechanics without calculus, but that ought not fill up an entire semester; a "survey of physics" class could take such an approach, but a purely mechanics class ought not. [edit] Also, the marginal student at Harvard is going to be quite similar to a student at any number of only-slightly-less selective schools. I could see an argument that this might not replicate at a large non-selective state school, but (assuming it replicates at Harvard), I'd assume it would replicate across a wide swath of selective schools.
- paulcole 2y ago> Also, not all proof is good Yes and people are excellent at deciding which proof is good. Turns out the good proof is the proof that supports what I already think.