When I read Diane Grayson’s review of Productive Learning: Science, Art, and Einstein’s Relativity in Educational Reform ( Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 60 9 2007 72 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2784689 September 2007, page 72 ), I saw it was flawed and chose to ignore it. However, discussions with colleagues convinced me that it should not remain uncontested and presumed accurate.
Grayson suggests that the first four chapters of Productive Learning were written by my coauthor Seymour Sarason, and summarizes them as dealing primarily with “educational matters at pre-college levels.” That is wrong. The book states that Sarason drafted the second chapter and that the theme of the initial chapters is how teachers learn to teach after they finish college.
It is not true that Sarason and I “make no reference to more than 30 years of systematic research in physics education.” We reference Arnold Arons, Lillian McDermott, and Kenneth Wilson. In addition, we refer to several resources that contextualize the criticism of the educational system; those include a book by Diane Ravitch, an issue of Daedalus, and several books by Sarason. The objections appear to stem from superficial reading and lack of familiarity with the depth of issues that hamper educational reform.
Our text states that so far, all systemic reforms have failed. My diagnosis of the review’s superficiality is reinforced by its citation of a website that supposedly exemplifies a successful systemic reform. The site contains a dead link and a one-page promotion with a few sentences quoted in the review about the Discovery program in Ohio.
I visited Discovery in the mid-1990s. My positive experience there is reported in the last chapter of Productive Learning , though without naming the program. I was so impressed that I engaged in translating McDermott’s modules into Polish and designing and attempting to implement a program of instruction by inquiry in Warsaw.
The most recently published longitudinal study that I could find about Discovery 1 describes its pioneering role in Ohio. The study concludes that “Further explorations of the data … would help to provide further evidence about the link between inquiry-based instructional practice and student achievement and help to tease out the effects of different intensities of training.” This is far from saying that a successful systemic reform has been accomplished.
As part of that study, nearly 1500 trained teachers were surveyed by mail over a four-year period before 1997; they were asked about their attitudes toward using the inquiry-based classroom methods they had been taught. Although the study suggests that students of teachers trained in Discovery fared better than students of a control group, it also says that over time the number of mail survey responses from the trained teachers dropped by half. The study did not find why, and the margin of error in interpreting various numbers found in the study is unknown. Carl Wieman has stressed the need for extreme caution in measuring results of teaching and warns university faculties that they can easily create for themselves illusions about what students actually learn. 2 I have not found any research results on Discovery more recent than 2000.
The reviewer complains that Productive Learning does not refer to the 1999 National Research Council report How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Instead we chose to underscore two studies of successful school programs by David Bensman 3 and Eliot Levine 4 that are probably more useful to the intended audience.
Although the review decries parts of the book on psychology of learning and reform, it speaks highly about the part on Einstein’s energy–mass formula. That reflects a general problem of physicists and physics educators: They have not yet come to terms with the context of the interpersonal relationship between teacher and student and its role in science education. The lack of understanding of that context goes a long way toward explaining why science education reform has not been successful: One teaches students, not the subject matter.
Lastly, the review avoids entirely the book’s central message concerning the relevance of science, art, and Einstein’s relativity to educational reform. Therefore, this review is a disservice to the field; it steers educators away from a positive resource.
