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Re: Thinking Level of students

I do not think that one can entirely take the stages to be absolute levels,
but rather divisions based upon observations and testing that seem to make
sense. Indeed students range along a continuum, and the categorization of
formal vs concrete is based upon arbitrary cut offs on tests. Piaget's
biggest gap is in the teenage and adult years, whete he originally thought
that automatically students achieved formal thinking ability. His data for
young children is large, and unquestionably of value. He fully acknowledged
his gaps, and even showed that development seems to be society dependent.

As an established way of ranking thinking ability Piagetian or NeoPiagetian
categories and tests can be extremely useful. The latter is being exploited
by Anton Lawson. The work of Shayer and Adey uses the Piagetian theory as a
guide to their very successful intervention in middle school. As a result I
feel that there is evidence that Piagetian psychology can be exploited to
aid in the design of student centered learning.

One can also categorize students as dumb or smart, but that does not seem to
provide room for improvement. The evidence from Shayer and Adey is that
targeting understanding of the Piagetian tasks, raises the ability of
students to perform well on conventional tests given in England. In
addition Shayer and Adey found that the effect is delayed, as the students
need time to integrate the new ways of thinking. Incidentally Reuven
Feuerstein in Israel has also been able to use interventions to dramatically
raise students thinking. His interventions have limited value to most HS
and college settings, as they are not done in class. The Shayer&Adey
interventions can be integrated into any science class from middle school to
college, without removing more than 10-20% of the material covered.

How does this allow one to tailor the instruction? For one thing, certain
tasks are not worth pursuing at certain ages and stages of development.
They tried the Shayer&Adey intervention at lower ages than middle school and
did not see any development of formal thinking abilities, but there was an
increase in what would be considered to be higher level concrete abilities.
This means that some of the methods that are necessary to develop higher
level thinking can be done at a variety of ages, and there will generally be
improvement. The essence of successful intervention appears to be exposing
the students to situations that challenge their preconceived notions. The
challenge needs to have a surprising result, but one that is not too
surprising. It needs to be one which thay can accomodate by changing their
mode of thinking. There do seem to be certain tasks that they need to learn
before they go to higher stages, while some tasks seem to be independent of
other tasks. Knowing the details of what seems to be needed allows one to
generate appropriate tasks that the students have to perform and figure out.
The students are not given the answers, but they generate the answers in a
group situation, which provides the social support necessary for success.
Also one needs to proceed from concrete to abstract situations.

Another factor is that you really have students at a whole variety of
thinking stages. You need to hit them with a variety of things. It is
certain is that lecture and telling students how to think has extremely
limited success. Most of the active engagement strategies used in physics
have some of the Piagetian elements mentioned above. They use the
surprising result to force students to confront misconceptions. The main
deficit in many of the curricula is that they do not sufficiently target the
Piagetian tasks that must be understood in order to raise thinking levels.
Specifically understanding conservation, ratios and proportions, control of
variables, and 2 variable situations need to be hit more consistently. Once
these types of things are improved, there will be improved learning overall.
The significant correlation between conceptual gain in physics and Lawson's
test implies this result.

Anyone who is interested can read some of the references that I have given
in various posts. I would also recommend going back to some of the writing
by Karplus (a fellow physicist). Since most of the relevant papers are not
in physics journals most physics teachers have not read any of this
literature. Rather than trying to rediscover these results it is really
much easier to find them in the journals and books.

Again, I would say that more data is needed. If others would pre and post
test using the Lawson test, and a "standard" conceptual test such as the FCI
or Tufts F&M Evaluation, then perhaps we would be able to make more
definitive statements. I would be very interested in seeing the results
from a lecture course. I predict that the same correlation will hold up
even when the physics conceptual gain is not very high. Some of you might
be surprised by the results of the Lawson test. At the very least, by
pretesting with the Lawson test you would know whether you need to target
specific tasks.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

The Piaget "stages" provide a (too) convenient set of categories
for classifying and dealing with our students. I grant you, on the basis
of my own experience, that they seem to be remarkably predictive. Such
experience is seductive, in that it tempts one to tailor the teaching to
the presumed "stage" of the student. That is, it tempts the teacher to
deal with students in accordance with the guidance of the Piagetian
framework.
I want to point to evidence (pointed out to me years ago by
someone on this list) that the Piaget stages are not really all that
predictive. See the experiments described in Case <The New Structures
in Cognitive Development> (Karger 1993), especially the data at pp 71 ff.
Experiment seems to show that "stage" of an individual is a highly
variable concept when tested. It is task dependent and time dependent,
and the time dependence is not monotonic.
I am aware of other criticisms of Piaget's work, but this is the
piece that I have read that led me to view "stages" with a lot of
scepticism.
One counter-example is worth one tera-example (with apologies to
Dick Hake)!
Regards,
Jack

On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, John Clement wrote:

I think that the problem is well established. I work with HS students,
though in the past I have worked with college students at Duke U, and at
RPI. Some of my Duke students had the same problems that I see in HS.

I do count myself among the number that can teach students to use more
formal reasoning. The methods for doing this are actually
quite well known,
and have even been embodied in some programs. Anton Lawson at
AZ State does
this in the intro Bio course. His book "Science Teaching and the
Development of Thinking" details the methods. Another program
which has a
good track record is "Thinking Science" by Shayer, Adey and Yates. They
detail this program in "Really Raising Standards", and also discuss some
other programs that also seem to work. Has anyone read these
books besides
me? They are based on various published papers in reputable
peer reviewed
journals.

The test for formal thinking is available in Lawson's book. I
get about 1.6
points of rise out of 12 in about 1 semester. This is about
1/2 STD or an
effect size of 0.5. Unfortunately getting big increases
requires a large
effort and time. It can not be done in a short time. A fully effective
program will take about 2 years. Again returning to Arons, he
points to a
study that achieved 85% formal thinkers by using careful
intensive Socratic
questioning. He also points out that this does not seem to
work with about
15% of the students.

I suspect some of the reformed or Interactive Engagement programs also
achieve high gains. Currently Anton Lawson achieves about 1
STD gain in the
intro bio course at AZ State. It seems to be possible to improve the
thinking of both HS and college students. The earliest that one can
intervene is in 6th or 7th grade. Indeed, that is probably the
best place
to start a cognitive enhancement program aimed at producing
formal thinking
skills. Shayer and Adey are doing this in England, and the
program results
in markedly higher scores on standardized tests 4 years later.
Raising the
thinking skill accelerates learning, and this shows up as a delayed gain
increase, but does not show up as an immediate increase. My
data shows that
raising the thinking level actually shows up as a measurable immediate
increase in understanding of physics concepts.

There are still many traditional counselors who consider IQ to be fixed.
The program invented by Reuven Feuerstein in Israel,
Instrumental Enrichment
(IE or FIE) have been shown to result in a marked increase on
conventional
IQ tests. Anyone who wishes to pursue these ideas would do well to read
Shayer&Adey, Feuerstein, and Piaget. Shayer and Adey base their work on
Piaget's ideas extended by various other researchers like Karplus and
Lawson.

Our schools are part of the problem, because by emphasizing just rote
learning, teachers are unwittingly dumbing the students down. This was
amply illustrated by the Benezit experiment which Richard Hake has
referenced on this list many times.

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.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


John:

I really don't want to get into a big argument /discussion
about lack of
abstracting in our students. Especially with those whose experience
lies mainly with physicists and physics majors. (Yes, I know, that's
not a sentence.)

Many teachers believe that they can teach students to abstract. I do
not count myself among their number. Shocking as it may be, most
students are intrinsically unable to grasp these relationships.

Wes


-----Original Message-----
From: John S. Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>
To: PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Date: Saturday, September 08, 2001 5:05 PM
Subject: Re: Thinking Level of students


At 12:09 PM 9/8/01 -0700, Wes Davis wrote:
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.

That statement is hard to interpret without some more
details, some more
context.

I assume we talking about
A) the basic new moon / 1st quarter / full moon geometry,
as opposed to
B) lunar nodes, pairing of eclipses, and the Saros

Even under this assumption, is the message that:
1) They weren't born knowing it, and can't picture it until
it has been
covered in class?
2) The picture doesn't "stick" even after it has been
covered in class
in the usual way?
3) They are intrinsically unable to grasp it, no matter how it is
taught?
4) They can't do it quickly using mental images alone, even
though they
could manage if given more time and/or pencil&paper and/or
props to work
with?

Those are very, very different meanings.

======================

I would find meanings (2) and (3) quite shocking. Even
meaning (1) would
be alarming. Geometric relationships in general, and the
earth/moon/sun
geometry in particular, is commonly introduced in 2nd grade,
and students
are expected to (mostly) "get it" by 3rd grade or 4th grade.
(You can
confirm this by using google to find a bunch of 3rd-grade
syllabuses. I
also checked with someone who teaches 3rd grade and has
advanced training
in developmental psychology.)

Meaning (4) would be no surprise -- and no problem.

Bottom line: I don't understand what the point is.....



--
Franz Kafka's novels and novella's are so Kafkaesque that one has to
wonder at the enormity of coincidence required to have produced a writer
named Kafka to write them.
Greg Nagan from "The Metamorphosis" in
<The 5-MINUTE ILIAD and Other Classics>