Thinking level - was World's noise

[Muhsin Ogretme <ogretmem@BOUN.EDU.TR>]

That is pretty normal since they have never needed to think at a higher
level. They could pass those standard exams by rote learning, or
applying the memorized solution steps to the standard problems. How can
we blame the students. If we can't challenge  _ properly_  the student
by a learning experience in which s/he will really struggle with the
concrete level of thinking/reasoning, how they should develop a formal
operational stage... Only aging, unfortunately, does not lead to higher
stages of cognitive development.

Wes said

most
students are intrinsically unable to grasp these (abstract) relationships.

I can only agree with you Wes, if those students have mental
inabilities. I argue and defend that even the slow learners can be taken
up to formal operational stage (not in a short time of course) by the
proper provision of learning experiences (Socratic questioning as stated
in Arons Teaching Intro...). For example it would be very difficult to
make a dyslexic student grasp some symbolic relations that we might call
abstract relations. But they can have a very well developed spatial
abilities.

J. Clement wrote:

The usual lecture method does not promote conceptual understanding as the research shows.

I should add that classical instructions do not cater the needs of every
learner in a class.  One size fits all type of lessons are only serving
to a few students. I think the classical instructions have that
inability of  helping the students to get to the formal stage (e.g.
abstract thinking) intrinsically.

J. Clement wrote:

Really good teachers should know educational psychology as well as the
subject they are teaching.  Without pretesting students for these skills,
you really have no idea what you have to work with.  Without posttesting you
have no idea how they have improved their thinking skills.

I  agree100%!


Wes Davis wrote:

>    Some recent work indicates that more than 50% of today's college
> freshmen
> are operating on the concrete level - they do not abstract.  Work done by
> Jensen,
> et al., indicates that many *never* achieve the abstract operations stage.
>
>    Many - if not most - of my college astronomy students are unable to form
> a
> mental picture of the relationship between the earth, sun and moon.
>
>    Wes
>
> .

> Yes, and if you read Arons you find that most elementary school teachers
> operate at the concrete operational level, in the last version of "Teaching
> Introductory Physics".
>
> But the good news is that he mentions that you can raise their thinking to
> where 85% can use preponderantly formal thinking.  Every physics teacher can
> benefit from carefully reading his book.  After reading it you will never
> think of teaching as easy work.
>
> I have seen surveys that show that only 30% of students at some universities
> achieve the formal level.  This is actually the same as the percentage for
> the general population.
>
> John M. Clement
> Houston, TX