In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, dennis roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >At 08:19 PM 2/11/2003, Herman Rubin wrote:
>>However, I believe that interaction between students >>of comparable ability can help in the learning process. >>But not if the abilities differ widely. >for better or worse ... school systems have more or less abandoned ability >grouping long ago ... some of it is federally mandated Except for a small period of inadequate attempts, it was essentially abandoned at the elementary level about 70 years ago, and sufficiently reduced at the high school level that few of the bright students can even get the mathematics which essentially all students going to college got more than 50 years ago. >BUT, do you really think that having a group of low ability students ... >ie, say those really struggling in math ... are going to be able to help >each other with their math work? i don't think so If they are in that much trouble, class is not going to help them learn anything important, and it will keep the better students from this as well. It takes teachers who do not just lecture, but present things in different manners, and who realize that what is obvious to them is not even recognized by the students, and what to do about it. Other students are rarely in such a position, as they have not had those same hangups. >apply this to the basic intro stat course at a place like ... er hm ... >purdue ... if you had a pretest ... then isolated the low 10% (the ones who >for SURE hate math and statistics) ... not only with this NOT be of benefit >but, it will hurt their chances of making any progress in this course One of the problems is that we do not treat the ones at the "low end" as not having had the background, but as having had good background, but not being able to understand it. If they are in that latter category, does it make much sense to lower what everyone else can learn to get them to "master" a pittance which they cannot possibly use properly? This would be like teaching medical practices to those who cannot understand the first thing about anatomy. If they have not had the background, do not lower the course, but see that they get the background first. Lowering the course makes it harder for all to understand concepts; at this time, I doubt that there are many introductory statistics courses which do not make it harder to understand that it is not a batch of formulas which are to be observed ritually without understanding. There is absolutely no evidence that learning to do arithmetic helps in understanding numbers; in fact, it is questionable that most high school teachers of mathematics understand the properties of the number systems. >i think your argument has merit at the top end ... but, from there down i >have serious doubts -- This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University. Herman Rubin, Deptartment of Statistics, Purdue University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
