Summary: Wells, et al.signifi cant experiments in physics education history, I want
to take this opportunity to explain why. I was so impressed
with the results that I contacted Raymond Hannapel at the
NSF, who arranged a pilot grant for a workshop to see if we
could train other teachers to do as well as Malcolm. This
got Malcolm engaged in designing and conducting work-
shops for teachers that evolved into the Modeling Instruction
Program, to the immense benefi t of teachers throughout the
country. It also got me engaged in running the Program and
continuing education R&D. I repeatedly urged Malcolm to
write up his thesis for publication, but he was too dedicated
to students and teachers to fi nd the time. When he was diag-
nosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) I decided to do it for
him. Sadly, he was too far-gone even to read the paper when
it was fi nished.
Here is what impressed me about Malcolm’s thesis:
First, he had devoted more than two decades to incorpo-
rating into his teaching the best available ideas and meth-
ods from PSSC to the learning cycle of Karplus, so he was
already experienced in “teaching by inquiry.” When he saw
how badly college students performed on the precursor
to the FCI [I. Halloun and D. Hestenes, Am. J. Phys. 53 ,
1043–1055 (1985)] he said “My students can do better than
that!” He got the shock of his life when they didn’t. The high
school data reported in that paper is for his class. Finally, he
knew what to do for his thesis! He had an outstanding set of
student activities and sharp data on his teaching, so he was
set up for an experiment using his previous class as a control
group.Second, with his treatment group he used exactly the same
set of activities and allocated the same time to each. He
changed only the classroom dynamics using discourse with
two major new features: (1) Socratic dialog that elicited stu-
dent misconceptions so they could be publicly examined and
corrected; (2) Incorporating notions of models and modeling
into the learning cycle to clarify what to do in each stage.
Third, as a second control he engaged a fellow teacher
named Wayne Williams who taught the same course and was
well matched by age and experience. Wayne agreed to cover
the same subject matter in the same amount of time as Malcolm
did, immediately after which students in both classes took the
same exam. Wayne used a conventional didactic approach
with emphasis on problem solving. Malcolm used an inquiry
approach enhanced with emphasis on constructing and using
models without mentioning problem solving.
Fourth, Malcolm made substantial improvements on instru-
ments for detecting misconceptions and evaluating problem
solving that were eventually incorporated into two widely
used evaluation instruments, the FCI and the Mechanics
Baseline Test.
Finally, results of evaluation were clean and decisive.
Besides huge FCI gains compared to both control groups,
Malcolm’s class bested Wayne’s on problem solving by close
to 20%.
When Wayne saw the data he exclaimed: “How did you do
that?” After taking a “Modeling Workshop” later on, Wayne
was so energized that he put off retirement to continue teach-
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