Differences in Teaching Phys Vs. Chem/Bio?

  • Thread starter Thread starter ZapperZ
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Teaching
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
Sign up Log in
33 replies · 6K views
Andy Resnick said:
You did indeed- the abstract states quite clearly:

'I was surprised to find that perceptions of scientific pedagogy varied significantly among the scientific disciplines, especially concerning issues of philosophy of science and epistemology, manifested in the approaches to teaching theoretical concepts and their development.'

As I repeatedly stated, my remarks were restricted to *pedagogical* differences for *introductory* courses.

But how about the emphasis on "philosophy of science and epistemology?" If anything, biology puts hypothesis testing up front and quantitatively in genetics. That is exactly the same method used in discovering the Higgs boson.

So far we have mainly discussed how "advanced" the mathematics used is, which is really tangential to "philosophy of science and epistemology".
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Andy Resnick said:
I feel trapped in a Kurosawa movie...

Well, we shall just have to disagree then, since our experiences in biology are different. Mine was as a student, having done biology at every level, but never having taught it - and as an amateur in physics, also having taught freshman physics. Yours is as a professional physicist, and now addressing the question as one also teaching introductory biology.

But I have to ask then - if there is a difference - then how do things "make sense as a whole"? Is there something missing in introductory biology as well as introductory physics, and biology and physics bring complementary perspectives? Or is there a clash of cultures, with one view being inferior or contradictory or less general to the other?

Also, if you use a different philosophy in research, why don't you teach that philosophy to your students? Don't you want your students to have the best and most modern view?

I will now make it a point to watch some Kurosawa :)
 
As I have said repeatedly throughout this thread, I believe the thesis of the paper in the OP is wrong. It does not describe any level of biology education that I had. And yes, I acknowledge that Andy Resnick is an expert in this area, and I am quite intrigued (and disturbed) that he gives the paper in the OP support.

So I want to add yet another point of rebuttal to the paper. Section D of the paper describes the postulation "What if gases are made up of tiny particles, too small to see, and they just bounce around inside of a volume and don’t interact with one another?". What I wish to stress is that this sort of postulation is not unique to physics, and that Mendel's postulate of a gene and its independent assortment is an analogous sort of theorization.

Another articulation of that analogy is found in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3176118/.

One of the great theories of biology is evolution. Evolution is analogous to cosmology in that both ask questions of history. The interplay of particle physics and cosmology described in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0201178 is analogous to the interplay of the laws of inheritance and evolution named the "modern synthesis".