On Teaching Physics

Figuring out what works: Discipline-based education research

When it becomes difficult to make sense of a situation, we need to become researchers ó to combine observation and analysis to figure it out. When the subject is our students, we become physics education researchers. At the heart of physics education research is a shift in emphasis in physics instruction from What are we teaching and how can we deliver it? to What are the students learning and how do we make sense of what they do? In order to make this shift, we need to listen to the students and find ways to learn what they are thinking. Only then do we begin to make sense of how students learn physics in a way that helps us improve our courses meaningfully.
What is required goes well beyond how even good teachers interact with their students. We both have observed classes and seen frequent cases where an instructor listened, but failed to recognize the student's real difficulty. For example, in a junior level electronics class a student asked a question about a comparison of currents at two points on a single branch of a relatively complicated circuit. Like many physics instructors, the professor in this class was a concerned and dedicated teacher. He listened carefully to the student and recognized that the student was confused. But instead of asking questions to determine why the student was confused, he proceeded to give a detailed description of how the entire complicated circuit worked. However, since the current was necessarily the same throughout the branch of the circuit, it was likely that the student's difficulty was a deep one  not addressed in the instructor's response ó that the current was "used up" en route. The student politely nodded (no better off than before) and the teacher moved on.

For the full article, go to: http://www.physics.umd.edu/perg/qm/qmcourse/NewModel/research/whatwork/index.htm

Why Study History?

Good excerpt from Peter N. Stearns:
People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more history than they are required to?
Any subject of study needs justification: its advocates must explain why it is worth attention. Most widely accepted subjects—and history is certainly one of them—attract some people who simply like the information and modes of thought involved. But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and more doubtful about why to bother need to know what the purpose is.
Historians do not perform heart transplants, improve highway design, or arrest criminals. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.
In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior—a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion. Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screening device in many societies, from China to the United States, and the habit is still with us to some extent. Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization—a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline.
History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. There are many ways to discuss the real functions of the subject—as there are many different historical talents and many different paths to historical meaning. All definitions of history's utility, however, rely on two fundamental facts.

More on Reading Levels

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress released in 2003, 36 percent of fourth graders and 25 percent of eighth graders read below the basic level. The lack of basic education often leads to high school dropouts and illiteracy evident in the adult population in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Education, about 14 percent or 32 million adults in the U.S. have low literacy skills. Levels of proficiency in reading needs to be addressed in elementary school to prevent problems in later life
In some writing systems of non-English languages, pictographs are used to represent meanings of sounds, while the English alphabet represents sounds. To read English well and have strong communication skills, students must learn the sounds of English letters and understand how they work together. When phonics is introduced as a way to teach English, language learners can learn correct pronunciation and grammar to avoid flaws that will result in poor communication.

The Past, Present, and Future of Common Standards

A. Graham Down offers this analysis:
I must admit to a bias: I am a strong advocate of national standards, was intimately involved with their first iteration in the 1980s, and am delighted to witness their partial resurrection in a new guise.  As Robert Rothman observes, the new Common Core standards in English language arts and mathematics are not top-down driven reforms (one of the difficulties of the first national standards initiatives) or bottom-up efforts, which have suffered in the past when the states, with the singular exception of Massachusetts, tended to water down their individual attempts to the detriment, rather than the amelioration, of American public education.
The Common Core standards, to quote directly from the book’s introduction, “set expectations for student learning at every grade level,” and the book “describes the development process, the states’ adoption decisions, and early steps by states to implement them.”  Most important, the book explains in depth the content of the standards, what they expect of students, and how the assessment of student results is going to be carried out.
While all of this activity, strenuous and complex as it is, may seem to the educational neophyte to be more theoretical than practical, the fact of the matter is that within six months of the standards being issued in 2010, 43 states and the District of Columbia had adopted them.  Furthermore, they are designed to be “all or nothing.”  (It is difficult if not impossible to adopt some of them.)  They are written with every student in mind, rather than for the gifted few.  Their potential for transforming what is taught and raising the level of academic achievement nationally is truly extraordinary.
Why am I guilty of such unbridled optimism?  First of all, a great deal was learned from the pre-Common Core efforts. The first version of the national standards in the 1980s was vastly too ambitious.  Second, current federal education policy is very favorably disposed towards the common core initiative. Third, international comparisons with other highly developed countries, once shunned, are now fashionable.  They reveal that, no matter how the tests are framed, America is in the middle of the pack, well behind the likes of Finland, Singapore and Japan, in what we traditionally expect of our high school graduates. Fourth, other organizations are in the process of developing common core standards in science (to be released in 2012).  Assuming that they are of the same high quality as their 2010 counterparts, people may be emboldened to do the same for the other basic subjects, and thus escape from the current tendency to narrow the curriculum to the point of no return, a concern of particular moment to Diane Ravitch.  Fifth, unlike the situation in the 1980s, the charter school movement has matured to the point that its growth can provide a nationwide institutional context to pilot the teaching strategies appropriate to implementing the common core strategies.
Finally, there is a significant movement to align teacher education with these new standards.  Ross Perot once said to me “All teacher colleges ought to be torched.”  Such single-minded excoriation may be over the top, but there is no question that the new three R’s of teacher recruitment, retention and renewal are integral to any genuine education renaissance, and are indispensable to the implementation of the common core standards. Let’s hope that all of this really happens.  Robert Rothman certainly thinks there is a good chance it will.  After all, all these favorable circumstances are referenced in this informative volume.

Important Stuff from the National Right to Read Foundation

Clarifying the Relationship Between Phonics Knowledge and Word Meanings
by Dr. Patrick Groff
No well-known or popular phonics instruction program ever has claimed that all that children need to know in order to learn to read is how to apply phonics information to identify ("decode") written words. Decoding a word by applying phonics information to it is done by producing and attaching to letters in the word their speech sound equivalents. It is vitally necessary for children learning to read to master this process, experimental evidence consistently indicates. However, decoding a word by applying phonics information to it is not sufficient for that purpose. None of the respected phonics programs has averred otherwise at any time. Aspersions that these programs do so, generally made by "Whole Language" advocates, thus must be disregarded as false.
The purpose of teaching children phonics information, and how to apply it to decode words, is to enable them to look at individual letters in a written word, and then to "sound out" each of them. Thus, dog becomes /d/--/o/--/g/. By "blending" together these three speech sounds in a serial order, /d/--/o/--/g/, a child produces an approximate pronunciation of dog. This aid to word recognition is all that the application of phonics information can provide. But as my experimental research indicates, it serves its purpose remarkably well. That is to say, when beginning readers obtain an approximate pronunciation of a familiar word, as the result of application of phonics rules, they then readily can infer the word's pronunciation.
In this regard, the term, familiar word in reading material, must be singled out for special attention. These are words children know the meaning of as the result of their previous experiences. If children hear such a familiar word, e.g., dog, then someone reads it aloud to them, the image of a dog instantly would occur in their minds. The application of phonics information gives children a similar kind of access to familiar words that children try to read.
It is known, nevertheless, that application of phonics information does not provide children such access to words whose meanings or connotations are unfamiliar to them. For example, a child who has mastered the application of phonics rules easily can decode the word, daft, as /d/--/a/--/f/--/t/. If the child does not know ahead of time that this word means stupid or foolish, or insane or crazy, sounding it out obviously is of no help to the child for discovering its meanings. In this regard, sounding-out the word, run, for example, likely will result in vivid mental images of it by the child. This sounding-out doubtless will not provide the child the entire 179 meanings of run that my unabridged dictionary says it has, however.
It becomes clear, therefore, that application of phonics knowledge is the best way to enable beginning readers to discover the pronunciation of written words that they are given to peruse. The wise primary-grade teacher makes sure that these are words familiar to children so that they can focus their mental energies on decoding them. At the same time, the astute teacher persists in expanding students' knowledge of basic word meanings and of the varied connotations of words. As soon as a word is familiar to students it may be included in their reading materials.
There are no factors more closely related to reading comprehension than phonics knowledge, and understanding of the meaning of words, say the empirical findings on reading development. Children thus should directly and systematically be taught to apply the former until spelling patterns in words become familiar to them. After this point, they can go directly from a familiar spelling pattern to its meaning, without having to sound-out the pattern. Children at this stage are released to devote their full mental energies to comprehending what they read. Their speed of reading increases significantly.
The most effective way to expand children's vocabulary knowledge, the experimental data reveal, is to teach word meanings in a direct and systematic fashion. Incidental learning of these meanings nonetheless does take place. For example, the child seeing the unfamiliar word, daft, in a story may request help from someone as to its meaning. Or, the peculiar behavior of the "daft man" in the story being read may allow the child to infer successfully what the word means. Then, the particular connotation of a familiar word that an author intended, which of the 179 meanings of run, for example, depends on the sentence in which run is found.
Thus, to a certain lesser degree, a child learns the meaning of a word intended by its author through the process of reading it. However, this fact does not confirm the Whole Language principle that children best learn to read "by reading," that is, that "almost all the rules, all the cues, and all the feedback [needed to learn to read] can be obtained only through the act of reading itself" (California State Department of Education, English-Language Arts Framework for California Public Schools).

The Importance of Phonics

Here's a great exercixe by by Dolores G. Hiskes

A long, hot summer can breed forgetfulness and cover up shaky skills that may never have been too solid in the first place. Make sure your child is up to snuff with this quick checklist and tune-up of basic reading skills:
1. Does he really know the short-vowel sounds, or has he just memorized the words? Here's an easy way to find out: Make up a list of nonsense words comprised of regular short-vowel sounds such as these: taffy, paz, nude, bis, void, meck, litchi, gig, and zendy, and see if he can read them correctly.
2. Another excellent assessment tool is to write the short-vowel sounds across the top of a blank sheet of paper, and draw vertical lines between each letter. (There is a downloadable master "Short Sheet of Vowels" at http://www.dorbooks.com/pdfs/PhonicsGuide.pdf on page eight.) Dictate some words to your child and have him write the word under the correct vowel heading. You will soon see which vowels he may need help with!
3. For remediation, make up short-vowel flash cards. Put a picture on each card that begins with that sound -- for example, apple /a/, evergreen /e/, igloo /i/, octopus /o/, and umbrella /u/. (Or if you have "The Train Game" use the cards from that game.) A quick one-minute review once or twice a day is better than a longer lesson only once a week. Think of brushing your teeth: would they look any better if you only brushed them once a week for a full half hour, rather than just a few minutes every day?
4. Does he experience difficulty blending words smoothly? "The Train Game" was created to address this issue specifically, as do the top sections of Reading Pathways and beginning lessons in Phonics Pathways.
5. Does he experience difficulty reading whole sentences? Have him read two-word phrases first, then three-word phrases and sentences, and gradually work up to longer sentences. Put your own words together, or use the exercises in Reading Pathways which were designed for this purpose.
6. Does he stumble over multi-syllable words? Write words by syllables on cards and have him read them. Multi-syllable word exercises such as those in Reading Pathways will develop this skill beautifully, as will the "Building Blocks" section in Phonics Pathways.
7. Does he have difficulty comprehending what he has read? Review Phonics-Talk newsletters Volumes 8 and 13 (http://www.dorbooks.com/, click on "Dorbooks Newsletter" to see the archived volumes.) These two newsletters discuss Comprehension issues extensively and offer useful tips for remediation.
These quick-and-easy remedies will soon get your student up to speed, and he is sure to be one of those shining faces happily bounding off to school this Fall!