Meeting challenges and facing the music in physics education

Wieman and Perkins reply: Robert Jones touches on many points in his letter. We claim some credibility as to “how physics is really applied and used,” and we disagree with his opinion regarding the Force Concepts Inventory. We believe, and recent National Research Council reports reiterate, that conceptual reasoning, as tested by the FCI, is an important aspect of doing physics.

Jones’s remaining statements about the proper ways to teach physics are a good example of the irony involved in many discussions about science education. Jones criticizes the research-based methods we discuss and advocates various alternatives, including students’ carrying out certain experiments, by which he says they will better learn physics. However, he makes these claims of pedagogical superiority without any reference to data or even empirically established principles to support their validity. Science made dramatic progress once good data and well-tested theory became dominant over personal opinion and superstition. One of the primary points of our article is that a similar standard needs to be applied as to what constitutes a credible claim for science education, even in Kansas.

We believe that Sheila Tobias misinterpreted our article. In fact, we and the larger physics education research community are studying student differences and developing new teaching practices and learning tools that enable a variety of approaches to learning. Their effectiveness is tested with a broad range of students and generally increases learning of and interest in physics for a much larger percentage of the population.

We appreciate Robert Schumacher’s clarification on the design of violins. Despite this oversight in our explanation, the example still serves to demonstrate that when the answer is not obvious or intuitive to students, only a small percentage of them will learn from careful explanations alone.