Nonlinear Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics

ucbalumnus
Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:43:39 +0000

calmom:

I don’t know what the standards are at the Univ. or Oregon – but at the university I attended (California), introductory STEM courses were taught in a large lecture format, supplemented by discussion groups and labs led by TA’s. At the time (early 70’s), the TA’s seemed to be generally fluent in Chinese, but not English. (*This might have improved since then, I don’t know).

Introductory courses in other areas tended to have much smaller classes, from seminars of 15 or less-- to a maximum lecture size of about 150 students.



What I remember was that both STEM and non-STEM introductory courses tended to have large lectures supplemented by discussions (and labs, if applicable) with TAs (who generally were fluent in English). The biggest of all courses was the introductory economics course. The exceptions were English composition courses, which were small classes (but led by TAs, rather than faculty as most other courses were).



calmom:

If the goal is to increase the number of students who are successful in pursuing studies in the discipline, then revamping of the curriculum makes sense, especially for a public university, which at least in theory should be able to work cooperatively with the entire state-wide educational system.



Fixing the (large) problem of inadequate math preparation needs to be done at the K-12 level. Universities (or even community colleges) should not have to have large numbers of remedial math sections to reteach what many students did not learn in poor quality K-12 math courses. Indeed, even if the universities and community colleges did have the resources to offer that many remedial math sections, they still would not be able to “save” those who lost interest in math after poor quality K-12 math courses and avoid having anything to do with math.