The topics of physics teaching and learning should be of the utmost practical importance to the physics community. However, the article by Dawn Meredith and Joe Redish leaves me bemused.
The authors go through some philosophical and anecdotal discussion of how physics might be adapted for biologists; they make no attempt to provide a serious inquiry into the literature of physics education or to develop their own systematic, quantitative studies as to what methods could achieve what results for different categories of students. No data are presented. Although the lack of data is pretty disconcerting on its own, there is much more.
In order to take seriously the authors’ premise that typical physics instruction material has been poorly adapted for specialists of other professions, and particularly for biologists, one must assume some philosophy for what physics and biology are, what they mean, and how they should be learned and taught. The authors’ philosophical assertion, as in their section entitled “The two cultures,” is that physicists and nonphysicists are fundamentally different in their approach.
The authors’ goal of attempting to recast physics for nonphysicists seems to me to be pretty much nonsensical—or at least hopeless—to begin with. Meredith and Redish assert that “physicists stress reasoning from a few fundamental principles . . . , view the world quantitatively and pay much attention to constraints,” whereas biologists “focus on real examples and emphasize structure–function relationships . . . with many interacting parts that lead to emergent phenomena.” Those unsystematic accounts reflect a psychometric compulsion for knowing a right answer, all too common in the sciences. It is puzzling how science educators strain to codify their subjects when their research is a matter of fundamentally open questions.
The authors also assume that traditional physics education poses an already admirable model, which only needs to be tweaked and redressed for their “overly simplistic assumptions” as they pertain to biology. Their assumption of the role-model nature of physics education for physicists is to me, as a longtime student, offensive.
What they might consider is that physicists and biologists have to think differently because the tools and methods of their research are highly distinct. Whereas physicists have traditionally been able to rely on analytic theory for many problems, biologists have generally faced an absence of tractable analytic theories even for relatively simple biological problems. That, I think, is at the heart of Meredith and Redish’s complaints about biologists learning about masses on springs or about cylinders rolling down planes.
Biologists rightly have worked in a much more qualitative context than physicists. But with the advent of modern simulation, the intractability of analytic understanding is becoming less of a problem, and biology might be expected to become much more akin to computational physics. Therefore, we might think of educating biologists more in computational than analytic physics.
