Subject: What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects?

Posted by Tony Phuah on 6/6/2010
In Reply To:What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? Posted by Sharon Villines on 6/4/2010

Message:

Hi Sharon

Thanks for your input, especially this part:
"It would be interesting to have a large body of college students take the SAT 10 and 20 years after graduation and compare them to their first scores.

My college and others, however, once tried to set up a study in which students from about 10 colleges took the SAT at graduation to measure value added. All the top schools declined to participate. The study was never done (to my knowledge) because the feeling was that the less prestigious schools would be stigmatized if the better regarded schools didn't participate. Since their students begin college with high scores, the feeling was that they wouldn't show the same gains and would even show losses in general knowledge. A Swarthmore colleague told me they have students take the GRE after the sophomore year because they lose the general knowledge by the fourth year."

This remind me to the last paragraph of Sterman's paper "Does formal system dynamics training improve people's understanding of accumulation" (http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2009/proceed/papers/P1113.pdf):
"It is also unclear how robust and durable the improved understanding of accumulation exhibited by the students tested here will be. Will their understanding of stocks and flows become internalized and readily recalled outside of the classroom and in later life? Will these students be able to recognize stock-flow structures and apply the principles of accumulation in everyday, naturalistic settings in which there are no special cues or prompts to trigger the relevance of stocks and flows? To address these questions, researchers should undertake longterm prospective longitudinal studies to assess the ability of subjects to recognize stock-flow situations and apply the principles of accumulation correctly in naturalistic settings. Such studies will be difficult. Besides the obvious challenge of subject recruitment for periods of years, such studies must avoid priming the participants to think about stocks and flows. Nevertheless, long-term follow up study is an essential next step towards the development of effective curriculum and pedagogy to develop people’s intuitive systems thinking abilities."

If I read your comment correctly, it seems to suggest that conventional subjects actually seldom try to assess their transfer of learning to students' everyday life for longer period of time.

Regards
Tony

Follow Ups:

What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Sharon Villines 6/6/2010 
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Tony Phuah 6/7/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Sharon Villines 6/7/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Bob Gorman 6/7/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Alex Leus 6/6/2010 
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Steve Crowley 6/6/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Tony Phuah 6/6/2010