Since it seems to be a good day for posting things that may be unwise, I'll throw this out. In the middle of a news release dump from the APS, there's a story about a new study of physics pedagogy that found gender gaps persisting in spite of "active learning" techniques. This is in contrast to a previous study from Harvard.
What moves me to post, though, is a sentence from the middle of the news squib:
On the bright side, both male and female students performed better in the interactive classes than students laboring in traditional lecture-based classes. Overall, however, male students benefited as much or more than females, which doesn't help to narrow gender-based performance gaps.
That's actually a pretty good consolation prize, and deserves better than an "Oh, by the way..." aside in the middle of a downer article.
Ultimately, the goal of physics classes in college is to teach students about physics. And, by and large, we do a piss-poor job of it, regardless of the configuration of their genetalia. Only 3% of students who take introductory physics take another class in the subject, and the majority of students who take introductory physics don't actually learn very much. It's well documented that a traditional introductory class produces an increase of about 15% in the students' knowledge of basic mechanics concepts, which is pretty weak.
Given that context, I'll take an across-the-board increase in scores. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could close the gender gap in performance, but given that both men and women are starting from a very low level, a technique that raises everybody's scores is a major improvement, whether there's any differential gender benefit or not.
Now, I understand the emphasis on the gender results in the paper itself: within the physics education community, the idea that active learning classes improve student performance is just not news. We've known that for years, so the new result here is that the Colorado study didn't see the same gender-specific result seen at Harvard.
The news release, though, makes it sound like the fact that these techniques didn't close the gender gap is a major failure. "Ooops-- it worked for men, too. Well, onto the scrap heap with that idea..." That's a ridiculous position to take-- it's a negative result for the particular study being done in this paper, but it's a positive result for physics as a whole. The news release is going to a larger group than just the community of physics education researchers, and I wish they'd taken a different slant-- someone who isn't normally aware of the field might read this story and say "Well, active learning didn't help with the gender gap, so there's no point in trying it here," and that would be the wrong message to take away.
This does not (I hasten to emphasize, probably in vain) mean that I think research aimed at closing the gender gap is illegitimate, or not worth pursuing. There should be lots of effort directed toward finding ways to close the gap by improving the performance of women in physics classes-- it's a significant problem, and deserves serious attention.
Until such time as we find teaching methods that accomplish that goal, though, a method that produces an across-the-board increase in student understanding of physics is a pretty good first step. Since that is, after all, what we're trying to accomplish....
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Maybe if we stopped telling girls that math and science are too hard for them at early ages, we'd see that gap start to close as they grew up.
I'm afraid that we may be running not into the problem of natural ability differences or discrimation, but natural interest.
Research into Asperger's, for instance, indicates that an interest in machines and the technical as opposed to interacting with people has a strong biological componant. Given that an interest in the technical often leads to an interest in physics and engineering, perhaps females are simply less likely to be interested in things and more interested in people. Gravitation towards dolls versus trucks in females have been demonstrated in infants, and even female infant chimps.
I wonder how much this problem really needs to be solved. I see nothing wrong with techniques that make everyone better at physics and simultaneously widen the gender gap. I think it's more important to have good physicists than female ones.
From your previous blog entry, it's pretty clear that the problem with teaching physics must be that the difficulty of the exams is causing too much prayer at the university.
More seriously, the Freshman physics class as it is taught today covers way too many topics. It is also typically taught at too high a level, given the number of topics it covers.
A guy I was talking to yesterday said that he only took the one physics class and it was very difficult. By contrast, his calculus class was easy. The problem is that calculus is taught as a unified subject with just a few simple principles.
Freshman physics has too many subjects and too many principles. You guys already know that the 97% of people who take it never take another physics class again. That should be enough of a clue. If it is not, then the fact that they only extended their knowledge by 15% should be a clue.
The course needs to have half its material removed. There is absolutely no reason to try to teach people principles that they're going to suffer horribly to not learn when you can instead restrict the subject to fewer subjects and teach them less stuff but efficiently. The class will be easier so more students will take another. And the longer time to teach the material will make it stick better with the students.
The course needs to have half its material removed. There is absolutely no reason to try to teach people principles that they're going to suffer horribly to not learn when you can instead restrict the subject to fewer subjects and teach them less stuff but efficiently.
Of course, it's never quite that easy. Freshman physics, like freshman chemistry, is a service course. One of the reasons that those courses are so scattershot is that this major needs this set of subjects covered, while that major needs a different set of topics. It's still worth doing, but the politics along the way could get awfully loud....
I'm with Chad, let's work on closing the gender gap but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Renee, if, as research has shown, women prefer people-related fields than why are they taking physics? I don't know about any where else but at my alma mater Intro to Biology was the only specific required science, plus one other intro level course in chemistry, physics, or geology. For the most part the only people who take Physics 101 are interested in some technical/scientific field. Besides, while the quality of the introductory classes has some effect on choice of major, I doubt it makes a big difference in the end quality of the graduates. Introductory science (and humanities) classes are required because the university or college believes that an educated person should have a basic understanding various topics.
I do think many intro level classes try to cram too many topics into the semester. And we definitely need to stop telling kids (girls in particular) that math and science are hard.
BTW, a new favorite phrase: Newtonian physics - learn it, love it, live it (from a blog by a paramedic on the use of seatbelts).
Any math or science course worth taking will be hard. Not impossible, but challenging and time-consuming.
It seems to me that using the reformation of the way physics is taught as a way to close the gender gap in physics relies on the far from established notion that men and women learn in fundamentally different ways. Every physics student--male and female alike--deserves the best approach to learning that can be mustered. I recall reading numerous experimental teaching methods that are shown to improve the math or science scores of girls--they may, in fact, have a better teaching method, which ought to be offered to boys and girls alike.
Hear, hear, Jamie Bowden.
Are those statistics about how much people learn in intro classes for all intro level classes? It would be interesting to look at those two separatly. I'm no suprised memorizing "when the problem looks like 'this' I use 'that' equation" doens't inprove phsical understanding.
On the "physics is hard" line, anything worth doing is hard
(not all hard things are worth doing, but).
Chad, I had the same reaction. The journalist who wrote the press release obviously felt that achieving gender equity was the only reason for studying teaching methods in physics. That "rah! rah! go team!" unbiased approach to reporting science, you know the one I mean?
Thanks for bringing this article (and others in that journal) to my attention, Chad.
1) It could be that the Colorado researchers have merely established that the mean SAT score of their female students is lower than the mean for their male students. [See the article by Coletta, Phillips, and Steinert.]
1a) What should be emphasized is that they obtained a 35 point increase (up 117%) on average while Harvard only got 20 points (a 31% increase). The Harvard students may have had the CU course in high school.
2) I don't think anyone has ever tried to teach everything in a calc-based physics textbook (the mini-PhD approach) since the comprehensive texts like Sears and H&R appeared. I think they taught everything in my Dad's physics book (written in the 30's, used post-war), but it was much more focused on fundamentals needed for junior-level courses in physics and/or engineering. The pressure has increased because we only get 28 weeks of classroom instruction in our state's system, whereas we had 30 when I was a student.
2a) Everyone trims something from the mini-PhD survey to exchange breadth for depth and mastery. The only question is what should be trimmed, which is why books remain so overloaded with extra material. In my humble opinion, leaving out heat engines to spend more time on gravity (a choice recently made by the university near me) does not serve a pre-engineering student very well.
2b) Discussions with engineering faculty at said institution indicate two places worth increased emphasis. In mechanics, it is free-body diagrams. Retention of this crucial skill is low, and critical to future success on complex problems where formula grabbing will not work. In E+M it is current, particularly how it is to be measured with a multimeter. Students can do problems just fine but still not understand the concept.
It is not unusual for an innovation intended to make an area of learning to an underserved, non-traditional, handicapped-in-some-way group(pick one)has the effect of making the material more accessible to all. It's the greatest argument for "curb cuts" there is. When we find a way to better serve those not-well-served, typiecally, everyone benefits.
What *could* be playing out in this study are the confounding effects of social interation, which *could* be encountered in an active learning environment. I'm old. I mean, I'm really old. Those women my age who have succeeded in the math and sciences (and, economics) tended to come from some exposure to either gender specific educational environments - or, in my case having been taught the math and sciences by women from a religious order (who would by default be women). It may be role models, or it may be the nature of the social interaction, or maybe there's an inherent pedagogy that emerges from one female to another female. I sure don't know. But, I'm with you, Chad. Throwing the baby out with the bath water is just stupid.
More seriously, the Freshman physics class as it is taught today covers way too many topics. It is also typically taught at too high a level, given the number of topics it covers.
That's probably true, but as Grant Goodyear notes, there's a strong service element to the intro physics classes, and other departments at least tend to say that they want broad topic coverage. You could argue that we'd be better served by siphoning the service students off into a different section, but we draw a moderate number of majors out of those classes, from students who decide they don't actually enjoy the drudgery of engineering.
The other problem is that if you slow the intro classes down, it's all but impossible to get to the interesting applications in the upper level classes in just four years...
It's certainly true, though, that the reformed curricula I've seen (things like the Six Ideas That Shaped Physics set of books, and the Matter and Interactions curriculum) tend to pare down the number of topics covered a bit, and go into a bit more depth on the things they do cover. That's probably a big part of reforming introductory physics.
Are those statistics about how much people learn in intro classes for all intro level classes?
The figure that sticks in my head is for introductory mechanics, where there is a well established conceptual test (the "Force Concept Inventory") used to judge student progress. This has been used at numerous schools, and the figure of merit is something called the "normalized gain" which is the increase between pre-test and post-test as a fraction of the total possible gain. The average gain for a traditional lecture-style class is something around 15-20%.
There are conceptual tests for E&M, but they're not as well established, and I haven't used any of them myself.
Um...what is active learning? Or maybe I should ask what is being compared with (the inactive learning)? Is the alternative just listening quietly to lectures?
I suspect "expectation" does still account for at least some gender disparity, even at undergrad level. I know that when I was first looking at universities, University of Colorado at Boulder was originally one of my top choices, based on their physics programme. I was actively warned off it by my HS advisor, who pointed out (with considerable evidence) that CU-Boulder, especially in the physical sciences, was rife with hostility towards female students and active sexual harassment; then he went on to say "you don't really want to do something math-based, anyway", something not particularly supported by evidence. *shrug* I don't know how much better it is now than it was 20 years ago; I don't get the impression that it has all changed.