Physics can put students on their own intellectual feet

Physics can put students on their own intellectual feet

By D.K. Nachtigall

SINGARAJA, Bali (JP): Physics appears to be boring,
meaningless, and not useful for daily life. The reason is that
most physics teachers focus upon providing the subject matter on
definitions and formulas in physics. They do not provide learners
with understanding about physics. Memorization still has priority
over application of physics to meaningful events. Therefore, rote
learning earns good marks, but thinking is often neglected.

To me, the main goal of teaching physics in school is to put
our students on their own intellectual feet and show them how to
walk for themselves. Since this has not been conducted very much
in physics classes, the outcome of physics classes in terms of
thinking ability are meager improvements. Major improvements can
be only made possible when physics teachers adopt a new self-
concept.

They should no longer be a god-like information provider, who
indoctrinates pupils with concepts they do not understand.
Instead, physics teachers should act as helpers for further
developments, both intellectually and ethically. This will also
include the three insights of teaching and learning, as follows:
(1) to present subject matter is not teaching, (2) to store stuff
away in the memory is not learning, and (3) to memorize what is
stored away is not proof of understanding.

The role of a helper for development implies that the teachers
should become aware of the existence of preconceptions in the
minds of students. The minds of students who come to a physics
class for the first time are not like empty bottles into which
"the physics" can be poured.

They are already occupied by naive world views, simple rules
of belief, primitive experiences and practical "working
hypothesis", by means of which students make sense out of their
environment. We call them preconceptions because they exist
before we give our physics classes. The concepts on which they
are based, in most cases, do not conform with the physics
concepts.

These preconceptions are deeply rooted in the students' minds.
They are truly "private mental property" because their generation
is biographically determined. They are sometimes contradictory to
each other, and often unconscious, but they are a common tool to
handle the events in the daily life-world. When students learn
physics, their preconceptions must be transformed into physics
concepts. When we want to do this with success, then we must:

* make the individual preconceptions conscious to the students in
the class,

* confront them with each other,

* observe, reflect, and compare,

* show contradictions among them,

* demonstrate that they often fail, in particular when we want to
make predictions,

* introduce the physics concept, the idea first, the definition
later, and finally, the mathematical representation which must
always be interpreted,

* let students feel a mental conflict because the physics concept
is different, and often counterintuitive,

* show that the physics concept is more powerful, explains more,
has a longer range of validity and allows -- first of all --
quantitative predictions,

* create, in general, an environment whereby the students can
develop strong conceptual understanding of physics through
examination of everyday phenomena.

Teachers often claim that it is too time consuming to discover
and transform the preconceptions. They must cover textbook
content and syllabus and cannot discuss the "crazy", wrong,
"stupid" ideas appearing in the preconceptions. So, they ignore
the preconceptions, or try to destroy them in saying that they
are nonsense and that the only truth in physics is what is
written in their textbooks. This must be learned, and everything
else shall be forgotten.

Both "strategies" fail because physics concepts, taught in
this way, are normally not or poorly understood and the homemade
preconceptions survive all physics courses given in this
unscientific way. The result of this kind of "giving lessons" is
that students just memorize physics vocabulary but remain on the
preconceptional level of understanding. When they have to solve
real problems in physics, they express their preconceptional
thinking by means of physics vocabulary and the result is what we
call misconceptions. All students come to their first physic
classes with preconceptions. Being taught in the described way
means most of them leave school with lots of misconceptions.

This is certainly not the goal of teaching and learning
physics. In my course presented to future physics teachers at
STKIP Singaraja, Bali, I have given many examples of
preconceptions; have shown how one can discover and transform
them into physics concepts; have demonstrated that even physics
teachers may have -- and teach -- misconceptions; and have
provided the students with strategies to overcome them. I think
that improvement of education urgently requires the
implementation of such a course into the curricula of science
teacher education.

Dr. D.K. Nachtigall is a visiting professor of physics
education from the University of Dortmund, Germany. He has been
working for four weeks at STKIP Singaraja, Bali.