Nonlinear Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics

Cardinal_Fang
Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:16:09 +0000

Calmom, you’re saying in essence that the teachers in the Bio, Physics, Chemistry and Math departments at Oregon can’t teach, because only one student in the sciences/math managed to do well despite entering with weak math scores. Not one department in the sciences or in math there is any good? And yet, in non-STEM areas, the teaching isgood? It’s just a coincidence that good teachers are found in every humanities and social science department, and bad teachers in every hard science department, and math?

Should Oregon be setting up a years-long remedial physics/math/bio/chemistry track, for students who come in unready for those majors? Oregon does offer remedial math. Students with SATs lower than 550 have to take remedial math; students with higher SATs can sign up for calculus only if they pass a placement test. So Oregon is trying to remediate math deficiencies, but math remediation is difficult everywhere.

Jaime Escalante, the Stand and Deliver guy, had to revamp the entire math curriculum at his high school, and had to go into the junior highs and change their programs and offer summer schools before 10th grade, in order to create the pipeline of students ready for his calculus class. The movie presents him as taking unprepared seniors and churning out AP calculus students, but the reality is, his program reached into the eighth grade, and only after years was he able to start teaching students calculus.