Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Effects of two different types of physics learning on the results of CLASS test

I have been swamped with work for the past week or so. That's why you haven't seen too much updating on this blog. Besides, it's not as if they found the Higgs already, so the news on the physics front have been relatively quiet.

Still, I was going to read this paper and post a comment on it. But I've been sitting on it for the past week and haven't gotten past by the introduction paragraph. so I thought I might as well post it on here and let you people have a go at it.

Abstract:  During a one-semester-long research project with high school students, we deployed and gauged efficiency of two different reform teaching methods: reading, presenting, and questioning (RPQ) and experimenting and discussion (ED). In this paper we report on changes in students’ attitudes and beliefs about physics and learning physics. We used the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS v3) to assess the relative effectiveness of the two methods. The data show that both methods improved student attitudes and beliefs but to different extents. The RPQ group (91 students) achieved an overall improvement of +5.8% in attitudes and beliefs, while the ED group (85 students) attained an improvement of +25.6%. These results suggest that both methods may have a substantial potential for improving students’ attitudes and beliefs about physics and physics learning, with the ED method being more promising than the RPQ. method
  
Would be interesting to see the nature of the differences in the CLASS survey.

Zz.


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