In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Radford Neal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, JW <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>From what I was able to tell, the thinking and mentality in the math >>department was just different. They liked theory and they liked formulas. >>They liked elegant solutions and proofs, even if they were irrelevant to >>application. I sensed a certain disdain for "word problems" and real world >>analogies and explanations to help the students conceptualize the theory >>because real math students don't need those crutches. >My experience, and that of other math/stat instructors whom I've >talked to, is quite the opposite. It's the STUDENTS who don't like >word problems, and resist applications (eg, to physics), because to do >them they have to actually understand the mathematical material (and >even some physics!), rather than just applying formulas without really >knowing what they're doing. This may not be true of "real math >students", however, who ought to be able to do the word problems (but >who may find the standard ones to be too easy to be interesting). > Radford Neal The students want to know how to plug things into formulas and get answers. This is the LAST step in applying statistics, mathematics, or whatever. One can study proofs from axiomatic approaches by themselves. But when one has a "real-world" problem, the most important, and often hardest, part is to translate that problem into a pure mathematics or statistics problem, so what is known from those fields can be applied. This requires knowing the CONCEPTS, and being able to formulate the "word problems", with the solution often having to be done by computers or often by those who can use the power of the subject, and possibly even extend it. The physicist applying mathematics, or the economist or biologist applying statistics, have to state their formal assumptions, after which the full power can be used, sometimes showing that the assumptions are not what the user thought they were. One needs a little more care with word problems than is often the case. The economist may not be able to formulate physics word problems, and vice versa. But when a word problem is properly formulated, solving it does not require knowing physics or economics. If this is not the case, at least the formulation is incomplete. Teaching statistical methods without concepts only gets them used as religion. In engineering, errors usually show themselves quickly, but in statistics, this is not the case, and I know much harm which has been done. -- 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, Department 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/ . =================================================================
