I recently finished listening to this review on curiosity in mathematics forwarded to me by Bethany Lisi at the University of Massachusetts Center for Teaching and Learning. As I read I’ve had some thoughts:
First: The distinction between curiosity and confusion and frustration is important:
- In curiosity a solution is visible even if not immediately visible one can see how to approach the solution.
- In confusion, one doesn’t see exactly how to get to a solution but believes that it is possible.
- In frustration one doesn’t even have enough information to begin to see how a solution is possible.
This is very important for the instruction of physics as well because students often report feeling confusion or frustration when what I’m really going for is curiosity. A key to making to helping students with this transition could be making sure that they have sufficient information to approach the problem, and letting them know about these different distinctions themselves because of course I can’t possibly provide enough information for everyone all the time.
Another important thought from the paper is that students generally believe that any math problem math homework problem should be solvable in 2 minutes. Furthermore, the amount of time that they report being willing to spend on a problem before giving up is somewhere between 11:00 and 12 minutes this is an important thing to begin to address particularly for 131 students but also for my physics 181 lab. It is really important to know that many students have this expectation in fact it might be worth asking them what their expectation is and clarifying how much time they should spend on various problems. However, if you do that you need to make sure that your homework assignments reflect that time expectation. I think, I’m going to ask faculty graduate students and my new undergrads how much who are Majors how much time they think they should spend in designing an experiment before giving up before they think that that path of exploration is in fact ultimately fruitless. If I can get this information before class on Friday then I could fold it in to my lecture.