Can Introductory Course Students Learn Much From Textbooks?

Some blog followers might be interested in a recent post “Can Introductory Course Students Learn Much From Textbooks?” [Hake (2013)]. The abstract reads:

ABSTRACT: PhysLrne’s Diane Grayson (2013) in her post “Flipped classrooms” pointed to physicist Jim Gerhart as one who utilized what she (and the PhysLrnRs responding to her post) ahistorically regard as the “flipped classroom,” i.e., requiring students to read material to be discussed in class before attending the class.

Sure enough, in his Millikan Award acceptance speech Gerhart (1986) at http://bit.ly/14qL5yS wrote: “I announce to my classes that I will not deliver any expository lectures on physics, that they will have to read their texts carefully if they are to follow what does take place in class.”

Gerhart reinterates an ancient theme: predating or contemporary with Gerhart’s read-the-textbook-before-class method:

a. Over 2 centuries ago, Samuel Johnson http://bit.ly/17PdW5Y, via James Boswell (1791) at http://bit.ly/qfDXPz said “People have nowadays . . . got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. Lectures were once useful; but now, when we can all read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary.”

b. A half-century ago, chemist Frank Lambert (1963) http://bit.ly/17IbWJ0 in “Editorially Speaking: Effective Teaching of Organic Chemistry” at http://bit.ly/1a4rqJr wrote: “Why do instructors ignore the contribution of Johann Gutenberg to chemistry? Thanks to him, we now have movable type! A few chemists can write books which are readable. Why then do we fail to use these excellent modern texts as the principal bases for our courses?”. . . . .

c. Contemporary with Gerhart, the late chemist Robert Morrison (1986) http://bit.ly/1dLd30J delivered his classic talk “The Lecture System in Teaching Science” at http://bit.ly/hLMElH. Therein he said: “I happened to run into Frank Lambert . . . . . He was urging what he called ‘the Gutenberg Method’ of teaching - because, of course, it was based on the fact that the printing press had been invented several hundred years ago. Frank became my guru. I still mentally bow towards the west when this subject comes up.”

BUT WAIT! Gerhart, Lambert, and Morrison seem to have had evidence that most of their students were, in fact, capable of substantial learning from textbooks. That such learning may NOT have been the case has been suggested by POD’s Russ Hunt at http://bit.ly/15EhNfA; Math-EdCC's “Haim” at http://bit.ly/14ZoHAv; and NAEP’s Perie & Moran (2005) at http://1.usa.gov/18G0T1M. The latter wrote on p. 15: “only 5 to 7 percent of 17-year-olds demonstrated performance at level 350—the ability to learn from and synthesize specialized reading materials.”
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To access the complete 15 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/1dMUKYZ.

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Links to Articles: http://bit.ly/a6M5y0
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For William Hogarth’s (1736) http://bit.ly/15Esohg skewering of the lecture method see “Scholars at a Lecture” http://bit.ly/18sWPDm.


REFERENCES [URL shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 06 Sept 2013.]
Hake, R.R. 2013. “Can Introductory Course Students Learn Much From Textbooks?” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/1dMUKYZ. Post of 06 Sep 2013 12:06:06-0400 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to various discussion lists..

The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the 21st Century -ADDENDUM

Some blog followers might be interested in the following ADDENDUM [Hake (2011b)] to my post “The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the 21st Century” [Hake (2011a)]:

PhysLrnR’s Paul Camp (2011a) wrote:

“Having taught thermal physics this semester, I'll testify that, at least for my 5 beginners, the point where phase space appeared totally baffled them. I brought it up only as part of a historical note about the arguments between Planck and Boltzmann so I didn't dwell on it, but phase space is perhaps a great deal less transparent to beginners than Lambert appears to believe. What actually spoke to them pretty powerfully (because it was embedded in a dice game activity) was Shannon entropy.”

To which Frank Lambert (2011b) replied [bracketed by lines “LLLLL. . . . “; my insert at “. . . . .[[insert]]. . . .”; my CAPS]:

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
MY APOLOGIES TO PROF. CAMP AND ALL PHYSICISTS!!

That brief piece . . . .[[“The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the 21st Century” (Lambert, 2011a)]]. . . . . was designed primarily for chemists teaching beginners. But, foolishly, I changed my standard opening description of “entropy is fundamentally an evaluation of how spread out/dispersed in SPACE [or in a substance] is....” and included “phase space” rather than emphasizing simple “space”.

(The first example in most first-year chemistry texts is the isothermal expansion of a gas in a chamber when a valve to an adjoined evacuated chamber is opened: the kinetic and potential energy of the gas is unchanged, but it is spread to the larger final accessible space.)

I, agreeing with Professor Camp, disagree with some chemistry texts that then try to introduce microstates, baby phys chem, and inklings of phase space to naive frosh. The best chemistry texts - in my opinion (of the 22 first-year texts that have adopted my approach) -- are by Burdge (2011) or by Burdge and Overby (2012). They superbly present the entropy increase of a chem process in changes of volume, temperature, molecular complexity, molar mass, phase change and chemical reaction -- with diagrams of differences in energy levels/occupancy of energy levels, but not a word about microstates or Boltzmann stat mech or phase space. I think that those next steps in sophistication should all be left for physical chemistry, the usual third-year course in chemistry.

ALL references to Wikipedia “Entropy”. . . . .[[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy]]. . . . . and “Entropy (energy dispersal)”. . . . .[[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(energy_dispersal)]]. . . . SHOULD BE IGNORED! The former is a hopeless morass with Shannon enfolding Clausius, Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs, while the latter was rewritten by a professor in economics -- from a spin-off by a non-academic person who attempted to have "energy dispersal" deleted from Wikipedia and was subsequently barred from contributing!
LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

See, also the cogent response to the above by Paul Camp (2011b) who wrote (in part):

CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
One of the reasons I taught Thermal Physics this semester was because I always hated it and that was because some of the fundamental concepts (notably entropy) never made any sense to me.

It took me some years, as a student, to understand what entropy is and the epiphany came when I tried to figure out what units it is measured in (oddly, none of the textbooks I used paid attention to this). When I realized it was basically an energy, then the first law made complete sense to me -- it is that portion of the energy of a system that is not available for doing work. All that crapola about disorder and everything was getting in the way of understanding.

Afterwards, the link with disorder made some sense. If all the particles in a gas are moving in the same direction (low disorder) they can do a lot of work, but if they are banging around at random, not so much.
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC

BTW - To education aficionados Frank Lambert is less well known for his “Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy” than his “Post Gutenberg University Breakthrough” - see e.g.: “Editorially Speaking: Effective Teaching of Organic Chemistry” [Lambert (1963)] and the all-time classic must read: “The Lecture System in Teaching Science” [Morrison (1986)].


Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands
President, PEdants for Definitive Academic References
which Recognize the Invention of the Internet (PEDARRII)

rrhake@earthlink.net>
Links to Articles: http://bit.ly/a6M5y0
Links to SDI Labs: http://bit.ly/9nGd3M
Blog: http://bit.ly/9yGsXh
Academia: http://iub.academia.edu/RichardHake


REFERENCES [All URL’s accessed on 18 Dec 2011; most shortened by http://bit.ly/.]
Camp, P. 2011a. “Re: The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the 21st Century,” online on the CLOSED! :-( PhysLrnR archives at http://bit.ly/rViO7S. Post of 27 Dec 2011 23:13:05-0500 to PhysLrnR. To access the archives of PhysLnR one needs to subscribe, but that takes only a few minutes by clicking on http://bit.ly/nG318r and then clicking on “Join or Leave PHYSLRNR-LIST.” If you're busy, then subscribe using the “NOMAIL” option under “Miscellaneous.” Then, as a subscriber, you may access the archives and/or post messages at any time, while receiving NO MAIL from the list!

Camp, P. 2011b. “Re: The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the 21st Century,” online on the CLOSED! :-( PhysLrnR archives at http://bit.ly/vUdYbL. To access the archives of PhysLnR see the information above in Camp (2011a).

Hake, R.R. 2009. “In Defense of Wikipedia” online on the OPEN ! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/fb4bJx. Post of 31 Aug 2009 16:41:53-0700 to AERA-L, Net-Gold, and Math-Teach. The abstract and link to the complete post were distributed to various discussion lists and are also on my blog “Hake'sEdStuff” at http://bit.ly/tTjuo1.

Hake, R.R. 2011a. “The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the 21st Century,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/s7heFg, post of 17 Dec 2011 21:35:08-0800, transmitted to AERA-L, Net-Gold, and various other discussion lists.

Hake, R.R. 2011b. "The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy - ADDENDUM," online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/vADrgv. Post of 18 Dec 2011 13:20:41-0800 to AERA-L, Net-Gold, and various other discussion lists.

Lambert, F.L. 1963. “Editorially Speaking: Effective Teaching of Organic Chemistry,” J. Chem. Ed. 40: 173-174; online at http://bit.ly/sZnEbI.

Lambert, F.L. 2011a. “The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the 21st Century,” International Journal of Pure and Applied Chemistry 1(3), online at http://bit.ly/upGF5C, click “Full Article PDF” after accessing the URL. At http://entropysite.oxy.edu/, Lambert wrote “[This article's] major goal is to explain why brilliant physicists and chemists of the past century failed to explain entropy clearly - i.e., to develop an adequate conceptual explanation for the success of dS = dq/T. Certainly, the 'driving force' in this relationship is simple: the nature of q, energy, is to spread out, disperse in space/ in phase space if its constraints are lessened or removed.”

Lambert, F.L. 2011b. “Re: The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the 21st Century,” online on the CLOSED! :-( PhysLrnR archives at http://bit.ly/tl0unt. Post of 17 Dec 2011 22:15:12-0800 to PhysLrnR. To access the archives of PhysLnR see the information above in Camp (2011a).

Morrison, R.T. 1986. “The Lecture System in Teaching Science,” in Proceedings of the Chicago Conferences on Liberal Education, Number 1, Undergraduate Education in Chemistry and Physics (edited by Marian R. Rice). The College Center for Curricular Thought: The University of Chicago, October 18-19, 1989; online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/morrison.html thanks to Frank Lambert.

Fortieth Anniversary of Donald Bligh's "What's the use of Lectures?"

Some blog followers might be interested in “Fortieth Anniversary of Donald Bligh’s What's the use of Lectures?” [Hake (2011)].

The abstract reads:

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ABSTRACT: Philosopher George MacDonald Ross http://bit.ly/w167Iu posted a link http://bit.ly/rsHEFd to his essay “What's the Use of Lectures? - Forty Years On.” Ross wrote [bracketed by lines “RRRRR. . . . . ”:

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
It is 40 years since the first publication of Donald Bligh's classic work What's the Use of Lectures? (London, Bligh, 1971). It was a devastating critique, based on thorough empirical research, of the use of the lecture as the main method of teaching in higher education. It had been established that the only educational function lectures were capable of achieving was the transmission of factual information, and even then they were no better than other methods, and lecturers wildly overestimated the amount of information students were capable of remembering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Among educationalists, it is established orthodoxy that lecturing is the least effective way of transmitting knowledge, understanding, and intellectual techniques from teachers to students; and it is a striking measure of the marginalisation of educational researchers and developers that, on this issue at least, they have had virtually no influence on institutional structures or academic practice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The idea of a university which replaces listening to the reading of a text in a lecture by the reading of the text in printed form is known as a “post-Gutenberg University” - an idea first mooted by Frank Lambert in the 1950s: http://bit.ly/rvZB2f. It is long overdue, and one of the tragedies of current university education is that we have abandoned the disputation, which really did force students to think independently and imaginatively, and retained the lecture, which has been redundant for half a millennium.
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

STLHE-L’s Martin Rosenzweig (2011) responded (slightly edited):

“I would suggest that lecturing persists because:
a. it is ‘cost-effective’ - one lecturer serving many (paying) auditors,
b. it is how most lecturers were ‘taught’, a case of ‘monkey see, monkey do’,
c. teaching at the vast majority of major universities is unrewarded or under-rewarded activity.
In the USA, the persistence of lectures has led to higher education’s being Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Arum & Roksa, 2011).”
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To access the complete 17 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/tJWK9R

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands
President, PEdants for Definitive Academic References
which Recognize the Invention of the Internet (PEDARRII)
rrhake@earthlink.net
rrhake@earthlink.net
http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake
http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi
http://HakesEdStuff.blogspot.com
http://iub.academia.edu/RichardHake


“Physics educators have led the way in developing and using objective tests to compare student learning gains in different types of courses, and chemists, biologists, and others are now developing similar instruments. These tests provide convincing evidence that students assimilate new knowledge more effectively in courses including active, inquiry-based, and collaborative learning, assisted by information technology, than in traditional courses.”
Wood & Gentile (2003) “Teaching in a research context”


REFERENCES [All URL’s shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 29 Oct 2011.]

Hake, R.R. 2011. “Fortieth Anniversary of Donald Bligh’s What's the use of Lectures? ” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/tJWK9R. Post of 29 Oct 2011 20:27:25-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several academic discussion lists.

Wood, W.B., & J.M. Gentile. 2003. “Teaching in a research context,” Science 302: 1510; 28 November; online as a 209 kB pdf at http://bit.ly/oK46p7.

Re: Lecture Isn't Effective: More Evidence #2

Some blog followers might be interested in a discussion-list post “Re: Lecture Isn't Effective: More Evidence #2” [Hake (2011)].

The abstract reads:

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ABSTRACT: In reply to my post “Re: Lecture Isn't Effective: More Evidence” at http://bit.ly/r80W5i , Ed Laughbaum of the MathEdCC list wrote at http://bit.ly/r8StCV : “My guess is that of the nearly 6 billion people on earth who have been (are being) educated, learned through lecture. . . . . Is lecture a common practice in China? In India? In Thailand? In Brazil? Canada, etc.? My guess is yes.”

To which Alain Schremmer replied “Yes, most people in the world learn from lectures but this is only because, in most of the world, there just are no textbooks: the teacher writes the book on the board and the students copy what's on the board in their notebook.”

A MUST-READ all-time classic in this regard is the hilarious “The Lecture System in Teaching Science” [Morrison (1986)] online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/morrison.html.

Laughbaum went on to point out that the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of lectures is related to the neurobiology of human memory as discussed by Gerald Edelman http://bit.ly/n1LpW9, Terry McDermott http://bit.ly/qNPAQP, and Richard Restak http://bit.ly/pfWYNg .
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To access the complete 13 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/mXiXoh.

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands
President, PEdants for Definitive Academic References which
Recognize the Invention of the Internet (PEDARRII)

rrhake@earthlink.net
http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake
http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi
http://HakesEdStuff.blogspot.com
http://iub.academia.edu/RichardHake

“Like the entomologist in search of brightly colored butterflies, my attention hunted, in the garden of gray matter, cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul.”
- Santiago Ramon y Cajal http://bit.ly/pTBxSA, quoted on p. 12 of
Edelman (2006)


REFERENCES [URL’s shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 16 July 2011.]
Edelman, G.M. 2006. Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge. Yale University Press. Publisher's information at http://bit.ly/n1LpW9. Amazon.com information a http://amzn.to/q5WOvl

Hake, R.R. 2011. “Re: Lecture Isn't Effective: More Evidence #2,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/mXiXoh. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to various discussion lists.