Christopher Moore is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Coastal Carolina University. He lives in Myrtle Beach, SC with his wife and two children.I will be at the AAPT Winter Meeting in January where I will give a talk about the conceptual physics course we have been developing (more here and here.) The main point of the talk is to look at the data and answer the question posed in the title. The answer to that question is … no!
I won’t talk much about the data, or conclusions and or future direction here, because we’re putting the finishing touches on a paper we plan to submit within a few weeks.
However, you are welcome to preview my AAPT talk. I’ve decided to try something new. Instead of the standard PowerPoint talk, I have decided to try Prezi.com. I’ll let the Prezi site tell you more about itself. My talk is embedded below.
The main points:
- Non-science majors are poor scientific reasoners.
- There is a strong positive correlation between scientific reasoning and gains in content knowledge.
- We can still achieve respectable gains in content knowledge, yet fail to improve reasoning.
We talk a little bit about how we are approaching the development of reasoning and present some very preliminary data.
[...] scientific reasoning ability of your typical college student is poor. Now extrapolate to the average [...]
[...] My AAPT talk is on scientific reasoning in the conceptual physics course is at the [...]