Ok....I am back in Singapore. Have been back a week actually.....but was having jetlag and had piles of work to clear and I could not update this blog. But I think it is essential, else as time passes, my memory will most likely undergo an exponential decay. And I find that my half life of my short term memory has been getting shorter over the years as well. Ok, so I will try and find 30 min to blog about some of the interesting insights or information that I got from the the conference.
Actually this is good, cause I will therefore only blog about the things that impacted me the most.
Crossing the Culture in Physics Education
This is the key theme of this year's conference about the role of context and culture in teaching physics.
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Prof Edward F. Redish giving his plenary talk to start off the conference. |
One glance at the theme, one would actually think that "cross culture" is between the Asians, Hispanics, and Caucasians etc. Actually, I was surprised that there was another way to think about this cross-culture thingy....i.e. to think about it in terms of disciplines.
Hm, and come to think of it, it is quite true for me as a student. Let me try to elaborate and summarise the gist of what I find interesting from Professor Redish's talk...and hopefully I don't get it wrong.
1. Physicists, chemist, biologists and those who study math or literature when given a same problem could think of it differently and also interpret the ideas different. Hence, they approach a question and solve it in their own unique manners.
2. What is therefore important for Physicists and which we seem to think are fundamental - like forces and energy. May not be so fundamental for students who take biology and medicine,as they belong to another culture.
Prof. Redish talked about teaching undergraduates not taking Physics as a major, hm...my mind was running through images of my students who are offering literature, history and who has not inkling why they chose to do physics at A-levels in the first place. Ok....I still think forces and energy is fundamental, I cannot image why not. I cannot see the value of literature except for enjoyment...(don't throw rotten eggs at me....I do read classics and literature....for fun....but have a fundamental respect for Physics), but I guess my lit. students could possible see no value in Physics for themselves. I guess this helps me to understand them better and develop an empathy for them and not be so impatient with them.
3. It takes time for students to inculcate the habits for them to think like physicists. It is not natural to them. We must articulate our thoughts and constantly show them how we look at things.
3. Physics is a culture, students are at the edge of this culture, observing and learning more about the culture. We need to help them to slowly cross over the culture - hm it means starting from primary school I guess - and understand the culture before we can move them in.
4. Many a times, we do not really understand Physics. We think we understand Physics. In reality, it is just that we are exposed to the same concepts many times at different angles and we start accepting the concepts and think we know them.
When I look at my son doing electricity at Primary school, I can better understand the problems he is getting now? Electricity and many concepts in physics are actually quite abstract to the students, cause these can be seen. We cannot see forces, we cannot see energy and we cannot see electrons. We develop these as we go along and with sufficient exposure and experiments, we believe in them.
No wonder my son is having problem with forces and energy and treating them as equivalent and I am pulling my hair out trying to teach him.
No wonder some students till now still mixes up concepts of forces and motion, as they "see" only the effect.
Hence, I guess we need to also to be tolerant of our students and give them time to explore the concepts till they are able to accept it.
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Further revelation:
Hence, for those of us who have immersed in physics long enough, when we see equations, we may be able to have mental physical models of what that equations are. For students, they are at the stage of infancy when to them the equations are algebraic equations with no form or shape or significance. They do not see mental models, they are often unaware of assumptions behind the equations. This does not help if the tutorial practices in schools and the assessment questions are choked with plug-and -chug question cause they will only see that searching for the correct no. associated with the symbols and chugging into the magic equations will yield the answer and think that they "understand" their physics.
Again, we therefore need to get students to interpret their calculations, have more conceptual and explanation questions if we want to develop their thinking in physics.
Ok....I am not saying there is no place in physics for drill questions. If I look at my own learning and do a self-reflection. I find that I always start with the plug and chug questions, cause I am gaining familiarity with the concept, then I look at the different ways they are applied and see how they work. When I have build sufficient confidence, and can use the equations without having trouble even to remember its basic form, I then move on to look at it more conceptually and then applying them to more complex situations.
Now looking back on our lecture tutorial systems, I feel that more should be done in the area of bridging between the lecture and tutorials. The lectures often introduces the concepts, and and examples often are looking a plug and chug question. Then we move on to some self-review question and discussion questions. But our self-review questions are often not planned through with a clear learning path and purpose in mind. The bridge between the self-review questions are often not clear as well. In fact, sometimes the jump is very, very big. We should try the lay stepping stones and step them from basic and build concepts on each other, before assimilating them with concepts from other areas. I know that is going to be massive work. And with us trying to limit the tutorials to about 10+ questions. It will definitely be a challenge.
Footnote:
You must be thinking...why do I only update the blog now. Network in Turkey is slow....very slow, and it does not help when the hotel you stay at has network that is intermittent and unreliable.
