Re: [Phys-L] abstractions

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

How do you know that they didn't have any problems with the formal reasoning
skills.  Did you test them???  I have tested students quite a bit and I see
the problems.  Anyone who doubts what I say needs to read the articles by
Shayer&Adey and also papers by Piaget.  The research clearly shows that
students have large problems with reasoning.  At one time it was thought
that it clicked in automatically at age 10 or so when there was a large
increase in brains size due to fast growth.  But that does not happen unless
children have the necessary experiences to make then click in.  We do not
know what experiences are actually doing this, or what experiences were
lacking for the others.

One difficulty with saying that they didn't have problems is that as a
formal operational reasoner you didn't notice when they had problems.  I
recall how I was puzzled by some of the things that students did to memorize
the equations.  I thought that it was silly to make up jingles to memorize
them when they were obvious.  They made up jingles to memorize simple
proportional things.  When I see a class where only 16% of the students can
list all combinations of button pushes for buttons labeled 1,2,3,4, I know
there is a problem.  I even allow them to miss one combination for getting
the point, but they either get it, or they don't even come close.

The majority of students when looking at the pouring task where you pour
water from a graduated cylinder filled to the 4 mark into a cylinder where
it comes up to the 6 mark, they assume that you just add 2 to the original
value to get the final one.  So if the original cylinder is filled to 6 they
give the answer for the second cylinder as 8 rather than 9 and clearly state
you just add 2.

Individuals who have reasoning skill, often can not concieve that others
think differently.  I remember when my daughter who was a camp counselor
said that her children were illogical.  The problem is that she had already
made the transition to formal operational reasoning, and they had not.  Of
course concrete operational does not mean they can't engage in some abstract
reasoning, but rather that they type of reasoning is very limited.  1/3 of
the general population of the the US scores at the concrete operational
level which means they still think like 9 year olds if that.  Only about 1/3
scores at the formal operational level.  College does raise the percentage
who score at the higher level, but it is far from raising 100%.

And of course you do not remember how well you understood physics concepts
in HS.  Again when you cross over to higher levels of thinking your don't
remember what it was like to be at the lower level.  Indeed when the
transition is severe, you may remember very little from the previous time.
Hardly anyone remembers the pre-verbal level.

As to spiraling, as a physics major you encountered the concepts a number of
times, so they probably eventually took.  Some concepts may seem obvious to
some students, so they take immediately.  I can remember doing a simple lab
intended to show NTN3 in HS.  It involved pulling a cart with 2 spring
scales in a row and one spring scale was measuring the force my hand exerts
while the other one measured the force the cart exerts.  I said to myself,
this is silly.  Of course they read the same because they are hooked
together.  The NTN3 ILD does not have spring scales, but rather separate
force sensors, so it is a lot more convincing to students.  They trust
computers and they don't know that basically they are a type of spring
scale.  Of course while I was observing other student reactions, I didn't
necessarily reveal that I thought the reactions were stupid.  I once tried
to convince a student that the Di/Do=Hi/Ho equation was just a simple
proportion as could actually be seen.  But they didn't seem to understand,
and I was puzzled by that.  They couldn't visualize proportions that were
obvious to me.  Now I know how you can't understand somebody who reasons at
a very different level.

Now it may be that you were in an exceptional cohort, but I suspect that was
not true.  There is lots of research on how people think and it is
accessible to anyone who can read.  "Really Raising Standards", or Lawson's
text are available used. Piaget's research is available in translation, and
his experiments were very definitive.  The idea of spiraling has been found
to be beneficial, and there is published data by Phillips and Coletta to
confirm how FCI score gain is correlated to the thinking level.  You can
also try giving the Lawson test to some students and see what you get!!!  Or
how about the findings of ADAPT:
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/adapt/
You may be amazed by the findings on how college students reason.  I
strongly recommend reading the ADAPT material.
Somewhere in the ADAPT web pages there are actual videos exposing how
students do on interview protocols, and they can be depressing.

By the way, I pointed to more general ideas as being necessary, and did not
mention much about physics, except for Galileo.  So it may be that physics
is better taught later.  A lot of my early science exposure was self/family
taught and through life experiences living on a farm.  By HS I had already
done so much reading that I had a lot of background.  I was shocked when a
student claimed she had never read a book, as I was from a family of readers
and read a book a day for a long period of time.  I knew I was atypical.  I
was from downstate and had experienced things that the other students were
not even aware of.  All the students were from a small community and most
had never traveled more than 20 miles from home.  Yet, 25% took physics and
4/20 went off to study science/engineering in college.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX 


> My personal experiences make me question most of what has 
> been claimed on the list. I grew up speaking French at home, 
> but there was a Polish Catholic grammar school directly 
> across the street from me - so my parents ended up sending me 
> there. It wasn't a huge problem because my friends that I 
> played with spoke mostly Polish and English - so I knew 
> enough of the language to get by. We had no science of any 
> kind taught at the school through the eight years that I 
> attended. We did, however, have an excellent grounding in 
> math. I left the school with a math background equivalent to 
> what would have been called High School Algebra II at that time. 
>
> I took a general physical science class in my freshman year 
> in high school. I then went through the usual sequence of 
> biology and chemistry and did not encounter physics until my 
> Senior year. I loved it and excelled in it. Most of the 
> college track kids in the class had very similar backgrounds 
> - no real contact with physics until that Senior class. We 
> were a small class (6 students if I recall correctly). None 
> of us had problems with "proportional reasoning and other 
> formal reasoning skills". We certainly had had no spiraling 
> sequence of encounters with physics concepts through the 
> various grades before first encountering them as HS Seniors. 
> For most, it was a course to be gotten through, but no one 
> expressed a strong dislike for physics. I was the only one 
> who pursued it in college.