Conventional vs Conceptual Knowledge
Wahid Banday
Published September 09, 2021
Few weeks ago, I came across a video by Prof. Eric Mazur on youtube. Prof. Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics and Area Chair of Applied Physics at Harvard University. In addition to being a prominent physicist, Prof. Mazur is also well known for his motivational lectures on education. Although this lecture is from 2009, it still appealed to me. A number of issues that Prof. Mazur highlights in this lecture are still relevant, especially in our educational setup.
While I encourage readers to view the whole video (available on youtube), I am going to summarize my key takeaways from the lecture. The core of this lecture is to highlight the difference between conventional and conceptual knowledge. Prof. Mazur shares his experience of how he was very surprised and disappointed, when his students underperformed in a test that is designed to assess students' understanding of the most basic concepts in Newtonian physics. The test being referenced here is the Force Concept Inventory. FCI is frequently used to identify student preconceptions about forces and interactions. The test uses simple and everyday language to assess students current knowledge, so a background in physics is not required. This makes it an ideal test to take at the beginning of a course. Repeating the test at the end of a course and comparing the pre-course and post-course results is usually a good measure of how effective the course was in helping students acquire solid conceptual understanding of Newtonian physics.
As a teacher and parent I have realized that students, especially the young ones, usually have a “common sense” driven understanding of the physical world around them. Unfortunately, this view is often incompatible with Newtonian physics. What is surprising is that even after many years of formal physics education, students seem to retain their flayed, “common sense” driven understanding of physics concepts, while accepting, just for academic purposes, laws and facts taught in schools and universities. This obviously leads to major problems in future.
Nothing exemplifies this more than a question from one of Prof. Mazurs’ students. When asked to take the FCI test, one of the students asks; “Prof. Mazur, how should I answer these questions? According to the way you taught me or according to how I usually think about these things?”. This question stood out to me as it highlights the failure of our education system. During my school and college days, learning about science had nothing to do with the real world. How ironic, as science by definition, is learning about the world around us!
The bottomline is that our current teaching methods are outdated and obsolete. The best we can expect from a lecture driven teaching method is some form of information transfer from the teacher to the students. Students will be able to memorize some of this information and then, hopefully, use it to solve some standard problems in tests. The more important goal of assimilating new concepts with the students existing knowledge structures, cannot be achieved through our current teaching methods. The good news is, science has already shown us the right way forward. All we need to do is act!
Nothing exemplifies this more than a question from one of Prof. Mazurs’ students. When asked to take the FCI test, one of the students asks; “Prof. Mazur, how should I answer these questions? According to the way you taught me or according to how I usually think about these things?”. This question stood out to me as it highlights the failure of our education system. During my school and college days, learning about science had nothing to do with the real world. How ironic, as science by definition, is learning about the world around us!
The bottomline is that our current teaching methods are outdated and obsolete. The best we can expect from a lecture driven teaching method is some form of information transfer from the teacher to the students. Students will be able to memorize some of this information and then, hopefully, use it to solve some standard problems in tests. The more important goal of assimilating new concepts with the students existing knowledge structures, cannot be achieved through our current teaching methods. The good news is, science has already shown us the right way forward. All we need to do is act!