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A brief discussion of common student pitfalls and complaints, and how this wiki attempts to address them. |
Understanding vs. Memorizing
Imagine that you had to solve a novel physics problem today, either in real life or on a test, and that you had a physics text that contained the relevant physics as well as a selection of solved problems. Even if you had a search engine to aid your retrieval of this material, would you feel confident that you could solve your problem?
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Please take a moment to reflect on what you have been trained to do when you study physics or review your physics homework. Very likely it is to memorize the formulae in the textbook and the solutions to the problems you’ve done. But the above example should show you that this is not sufficient – somehow you need to understand the material as well. Understanding involves being able to visualize the problem and to see the deep regularities (e.g. conservation of energy) that underlie the solution to many of these example problems. Paradoxically, if your understanding is at this level, you only need to remember the typical schema (plan of attack) involving each concept in order to be able to solve many problems – you don’t need to know the detailed solution of many different example problems involving that concept.
Constructing Understanding
Education experts agree that understanding must be constructed in your mind by your own thought processes. Passive memorization is not enough – rather you must place new knowledge within the context of what you already know and understand. For example, you probably understand intuitively that if your opponent in a snowball (or water balloon) fight is crouching behind a low fence, then you must lob your projectile slowly so that it descends at a steep angle, allowing it to pass over the fence and land on the target. Obviously this intuitive understanding should be transferred to the artillery problem discussed above.
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If she thinks about this until she realizes that the difference is that the air track in class has been designed to reduce friction to insignificance but that there is considerably more friction even on a rolling ball on the playground, then her physics class can enrich her view of the everyday world, and vice versa. On the other hand, if her mental model is that what happens in the classroom is according to one set of rules while the real world operates according to another, then Newtonian mechanics will be a foreign set of concepts and equations that describe only the teacher’s reality and which will soon be forgotten.
Constructing Your Understanding
In order to construct your own knowledge, you must think about what you are reading in the text or hearing in lecture, and you must learn to step back from a problem both while beginning to solve it and also after you have finished.
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