Aps-ajp-11-1001-Book indb

HISTORICAL NOTE, BY DAVID HESTENES:
This paper serves as a published account of Malcolm Wells’ 
1987 doctoral thesis. Since I regard that work as the most 
APS-AJP-11-1001-Book.indb 28
APS-AJP-11-1001-Book.indb 28
27/12/11 2:56 PM
27/12/11 2:56 PM

---

Teacher Education in Physics 
29
Summary: Wells, et al.
signifi cant experiments in physics education history, I want 
to take this opportunity to explain why. I was so impressed 
with the results that I contacted Raymond Hannapel at the 
NSF, who arranged a pilot grant for a workshop to see if we 
could train other teachers to do as well as Malcolm. This 
got Malcolm engaged in designing and conducting work-
shops for teachers that evolved into the Modeling Instruction 
Program, to the immense benefi t of teachers throughout the 
country. It also got me engaged in running the Program and 
continuing education R&D. I repeatedly urged Malcolm to 
write up his thesis for publication, but he was too dedicated 
to students and teachers to fi nd the time. When he was diag-
nosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) I decided to do it for 
him. Sadly, he was too far-gone even to read the paper when 
it was fi nished.
Here is what impressed me about Malcolm’s thesis:
First, he had devoted more than two decades to incorpo-
rating into his teaching the best available ideas and meth-
ods from PSSC to the learning cycle of Karplus, so he was 
already experienced in “teaching by inquiry.” When he saw 
how badly college students performed on the precursor 
to the FCI [I. Halloun and D. Hestenes, Am. J. Phys. 53, 
1043–1055 (1985)] he said “My students can do better than 
that!” He got the shock of his life when they didn’t. The high 
school data reported in that paper is for his class. Finally, he 
knew what to do for his thesis! He had an outstanding set of 
student activities and sharp data on his teaching, so he was 
set up for an experiment using his previous class as a control 
group.
Second, with his treatment group he used exactly the same 
set of activities and allocated the same time to each. He 
changed only the classroom dynamics using discourse with 
two major new features: (1) Socratic dialog that elicited stu-
dent misconceptions so they could be publicly examined and 
corrected; (2) Incorporating notions of models and modeling 
into the learning cycle to clarify what to do in each stage.
Third, as a second control he engaged a fellow teacher 
named Wayne Williams who taught the same course and was 
well matched by age and experience. Wayne agreed to cover 
the same subject matter in the same amount of time as Malcolm 
did, immediately after which students in both classes took the 
same exam. Wayne used a conventional didactic approach 
with emphasis on problem solving. Malcolm used an inquiry 
approach enhanced with emphasis on constructing and using 
models without mentioning problem solving. 
Fourth, Malcolm made substantial improvements on instru-
ments for detecting misconceptions and evaluating problem 
solving that were eventually incorporated into two widely 
used evaluation instruments, the FCI and the Mechanics 
Baseline Test.
Finally, results of evaluation were clean and decisive. 
Besides huge FCI gains compared to both control groups, 
Malcolm’s class bested Wayne’s on problem solving by close 
to 20%. 
When Wayne saw the data he exclaimed: “How did you do 
that?” After taking a “Modeling Workshop” later on, Wayne 
was so energized that he put off retirement to continue teach-
ing for many more years.
APS-AJP-11-1001-Book.indb 29
APS-AJP-11-1001-Book.indb 29
27/12/11 2:56 PM
27/12/11 2:56 PM

---

Summary: Eylon and Bagno
30 
Teacher Education in Physics