Mastery and Conceptual Understanding in Physics

For decades, physics professors in universities and colleges in the US have known there is something wrong with physics studies in their schools. Their own physics majors have a poor understanding of basic concepts in mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and quantum mechanics.

Journals like The American Journal of Physics (devoted to teaching and pedagogy at the university level) and Physics Teacher (the same for high school and lower) bring up these issues, with a variety of proposed changes and solutions both at the individual classroom level and at the higher theory-of-ed level. D. Hestenes at ASU and his colleagues have done work in this area, both in questioning the failures of pedagogy and developing some solutions. First, the problems.

D. Hestenes wrote in "What Do Graduate Oral Exams Tell Us?" (Am J. Phys. 63:1069 (1995)) of finding a quote from physicist W. F. G. Swann, in "The Teaching of Physics", (Am. J. Phys. 19, 182-187 (1950)):

"Much can be said about oral examinations for doctor’s degrees, and in my judgment not much can be said that is good. I have sat in innumerable examinations for Ph.D. at very many different universities, sometimes as a member of the permanent faculty and sometimes as a visitor. In almost every case the knowledge exhibited was such that if it represented the true state of mind of the student, he never should have passed. However, after the examination is concluded there is usually a discussion to the effect that: "Well, So-and-so got tied up pretty badly, but I happen to know that he is a very good man," etc., etc., and so finally he is passed."

Hestenes goes on to quote Swann as saying [A student] "passes his tests frequently [including graduate comprehensive exams], alas, with very little comprehension of what he has been doing."

Hestenes diagnoses the problem as this:

It seems not to have occurred to the faculty that dismal oral exams may be symptoms of a severe deficiency in the entire physics curriculum. I submit that there is good reason to believe that they are symptomatic of a general failure to develop student skills in qualitative modeling and analysis.

Of course, the errors didn't just start in college. Generally speaking, proper physical intuition is lacking in students who took high school physics, even in those who did well. Hestenes writes in "Force Concept Inventory", (Physics Teacher, Vol. 30, March 1992, 141-158)

"it has been established that1 (1) commonsense beliefs about motion and force are incompatible with Newtonian concepts in most respects, (2) conventional physics instruction produces little change in these beliefs, and (3) this result is independent of the instructor and the mode of instruction. The implications could not be more serious. Since the students have evidently not learned the most basic Newtonian concepts, they must have failed to comprehend most of the material in the course. "

Hestenes et. al. wrote the Force Concept Inventory, a multiple choice test whose aim is to "to probe student beliefs on this matter and how these beliefs compare with the many dimensions of the Newtonian concept. " It poses questions that force a choice between the correct Newtonian answer for an explanation of a given system, and other commonsense explanations that are actually misconceptions. After the test, interviews are done to determine students' reasoning.

Here's an example of a misconception that the FCI aims to tease out of a student:

[The misconception of "impetus":]
The term "impetus" dates back to pre-Galilean times before the concept was discredited scientifically. Of course, students never use the word "impetus"; they might use any of a number of terms, but "force" is perhaps the most common. Impetus is conceived to be an inanimate "motive power" or "intrinsic force" that keeps things moving. This, of course, contradicts Newton’s First Law, which is why Impetus in Table II is assigned the same number as the First Law in Table I. Evidence that a student believes in some kind of impetus is therefore evidence that the First Law is not understood.

The FCI has been given to thousands of college and high school students. The above paper details the results on the FCI, given as a pre and post test to both high school and undergraduate physics courses, with tremendous detail on similarities and differences across classrooms in the country. More, it provides strong evidence that traditional college physics pedagogy isn't doing anything to teach physics to the students who take it:

"The pretest/post test Inventory scores of 52/63 for [The Regular Physics Mechanics course at Arizona State University] are nearly identical to the 51/64 scores obtained with the Diagnostic for the same course...we have post test averages of 60 and 63 for two other professors teaching the same course. Thus, we have the incredible result of nearly identical post test scores for seven different professors (with more than a thousand students). It is hard to imagine stronger statistical evidence for the original conclusion that Diagnostic posttest scores for conventional instruction are independent of the instructor. One might infer from this that the modest 11% gain for Arizona State Reg. in Table III is achieved by the students on their own. "

Which brings us back to the state of physics majors going to graduate school:

One of us (Hestenes) interviewed 16 first-year graduate students beginning graduate mechanics at Arizona State University. The interviews were in depth on the questions they had missed on the Inventory (more than half an hour for most students). Half the students were American and half were foreign nationals (mostly Chinese). Only two of the students (both Chinese) exhibited a perfect understanding of all physical concepts on the Inventory, though one of them missed several questions because of a severe English deficiency. These two also turned out to be far and away the best students in the mechanics class, with near perfect scores on every test and problem assignment. Every one of the other students exhibited a deficient understanding of buoyancy, as mentioned earlier. The most severe misconceptions were found in three Americans who clearly did not understand Newton’s Third Law (detected by missing question 13) and exhibited reading deficiencies to boot. Two of these still retained the Impetus concept, while the other had misconceptions about friction. Not surprisingly, the student with the most severe misconceptions failed graduate mechanics miserably, while the other two managed to squeak through the first year of graduate school on probation.

Is it just that the Chinese students who manage to get into US physics grad schools are such creme de la creme that they are perfect? Or is Chinese instruction vastly superior?

(And for those who wonder about American instruction in other subjects, read this and weep:)

One disturbing observation from the interviews was that five of the eight Americans, as well as five of the others, exhibited moderate to severe difficulty understanding English text. In most cases the difficulty could be traced to overlooking the critical role of "little words" such as prepositions in determining meaning. As a consequence, we discarded two interesting problems from our original version of the Inventory because they were misread more often than not.

And yet, those who make it through physics graduate school to professordom mostly correct these errors, at least in mechanics. (Though not necessarily. In quantum mechanics, new professors are notorious for teaching elements of the material incorrectly. In special relativity, David Mermin, prof at Cornell, believes many professors teach the entire subject wrong. (He discusses this in a paper called something like "how to teach Special Relativity.") Hestenes suggests this is due to the realities of post quals grad school: the day in, day out teaching and researching refine one's intuition over and over again.

I think this implies something else he doesn't say. Error correction in intuition can only occur and stick if the mastery of the manipulation of the equations is so strong that you believe what they tell you. If you can be forced to do the math on the board, and forced to read and think about what it says, then you can learn the truth counter to what your intuition tells you, but only if you are utterly sure you did the math on the board correctly.

If instead, you doubt yourself, doubt your manipulation of equations, doubt your application of the laws as you understand them, then you will get confused, doubt your answer, default to your intuition, and scrap learning the correct way to think.

That means you need a tremendous amount of mastery. How in the world to achieve that?

Hestenes' answer --changing how physics is taught in high school and in college--will be explored in a week or so.


Physics Education and Failures in Conceptual Understanding
Fixing Physics Education: Modeling Instruction
Physics Education Continued
More Modeling Instruction: Techniques