🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 12 May 1995, LUDVIK KOWALSKI wrote:

> Reading the literature is certainly a preliminary step in a dissertation
> project but is it really important in elementary courses?
.....
>
> At what level of teaching should "reading the literature" be put before
> the "unbiased investigations" guided by "what I already know" about the
> subject? The OTOBIT topic is very important and I would very much like
> to know what other teachers have to say about it.
>
> Please note that the acronym can be read backward meaning "Think
> Intensively Before Observing This Object (or Occurence)". When and how
> should we start shifting from OTOBITing to TIBOTOing? And what should
> we do to promote these activities in our classes?

I am just old enough to remember freshmen college students of years ago,
but not so old that I've forgotten the details. We could then expect that
students would come to laboratory having read (and seriously attempted to
understand) the relevant parts of the textbook, had written out an
experimental strategy, and even had the error equation(s) worked out, to
save time in lab and serve as a guide to effective choice of values to
measure. Yet they were still observant enough and adaptable enough to
modify the plan as necessary, in the light of observations, and to
observe things they hadn't expected, and to deal with them intelligently.
And we didn't even have to *ask* them to do this, these were just the
habits they had learned in high school.

Today we are lucky if they even remember which experiment is to be
done this week. How things change.

If students had to learn *everything* by personal discovery, they'd never
learn but a tiny fraction of physics. That's why physics has developed an
elaborate structure of theory, so folks coming into the field won't have
to reinvent all of those wheels themselves. A balance between 'book
learning' and 'the discovery method' seems best to me, but these days the
scales seem to have shifted to the point where very few students can
learn *anything* from a book. And the books have gotten better and
larger, with more 'helps' for the student--in inverse proportion to the
students' ability to read with comprehension.

        -- Donald