Matt Cronin's List: checkitout

• Students in these seven different classes took the test at the beginning of the semester. Perhaps not surprisingly, they didn’t do very well (though many of them had already taken high school physics; Hestenes and Halloun expected them to do better).

   

  The students took the test again at the end of the semester. And they still didn’t do very well. Their scores went up by only about 14 percent, meaning that, after an entire semester, they understood only about 14 percent more about the fundamental concepts of physics than they had at the beginning.
• “If you look at what’s happening in the introductory classes, even at the best schools, the classes only seem to be really working for about 10 percent of the students,” he says. “And I think all the evidence indicates that these 10 percent are the 10 percent of students that would learn it even without the instructor. They essentially learn it on their own.
• the traditional lecture is not an effective way to teach any subject.

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