Qulog

As I am cleaning up my mess of Draft Posts to have a clean start of 2006 (Happy New Year, everyone!), I present you:

The Physics of Superheroes, not a textbook but it does explain physics using the adventures of various Superheroes. (Via Cosmic Variance)

Coturnix at Science and Politics on using malaria and other diseases as real life contexts for learning biology.

From Chris Correa, a discussion on problems with curriculum reform, and another on ‘constructivist math’ that I linked to earlier. After the jump are some thoughts about the discussion on constructivist math. I don’t know anything about the math programs grouped under the term ‘constructivist math’, but the discussion reminds me of other discussions.

Ways of clouding the (any) discussion:
-interpreting the idea or theory at stake in the most radical way, and noting that is ridiculous or not practical or whatever
-interpreting the idea at stake in the most superficial way, and noting that everybody believes this so it’s nothing new
-concluding the idea at stake is worthless, from one or a few badly conducted experiments or from anecdote
-concluding this new way of teaching/learning is worthless, because it is not the way the experts in the field (or the people discussing) were taught/have learned it way back when
-or, the other way around, concluding the idea is good simply because it is new.

Firstly, ‘constructivist principles’ is a ridiculously broad term. It can mean anything from ‘when you learn something, you build on earlier knowledge’ to ‘all knowledge is a social construct’ and ‘the only way to learn something is to construct it yourself’. This makes the first two ways of clouding the discussion quite easy. For instance, commenter kderosa writes “Usually when one talks about constructivist principles they mean teaching conceptual understanding. Almost no one disagrees with this”. As I said, I think constructivism is not very well-defined, or at least it means something different to different people, so I’m not sure you can say that it “usually” means this or that. (Another point is that *of course* everybody will say that teaching conceptual understanding is important. And probably also that they try to do that. But what exactly is meant by that?)

Following on the comment by aschoolyardblogger: what can you say about a new curriculum when teachers do something else because they don’t trust is? And apart from the teachers, some parents may also lack trust in the new curriculum, and protest it, or teach their children math ‘the old fashioned way’ after school hours. Of course both groups may have good reasons not to trust it, and of course any educational reform (D: zie ook het gedonder over het studiehuis) can seem like an unethical experiment, but whatever the reasons are: if the experiment is not really conducted, you can’t tell much from the results.