Re: Piaget and asundry

["Dewey Dykstra, Jr." <dykstrad@varney.idbsu.edu>]

>    In response to an earlier post, I think that one reason that Piaget
> is no longer fashionable among Physics people is that Piagettian ideas
> allowed us to understand and categorize some of our successes and
> failures but never produced any systems that produced better
> instruction.  At least, no systems were publicized that produced better
> instruction without using up very large amounts of instructor time.  I
> think that there is a lesson for contemporary efforts in there also.
> --
> Maurice Barnhill, mvb@udel.edu

Comment motivated by Maurice's note:
This may in fact be the main reason for low fashionability, but is it a
reason to write such ideas off?  Piaget was a philosopher/psychologist not
an educator or materials developer.  I think that it is significant that
while materials which did and do produce significantly different learning
results were developed (SCIS from Karplus or Zollman's work, to name a
couple of examples*), apparently the physics community generally has not
been willing to accommodate what it takes to actually make use of such
approaches.  (Is "large amounts of instructor time" really the sticking
point here?)

Now the fact is that such instruction was publicized both in the literature
and described in a workshop developed and offered by AAPT.  Apparently the
'picture' is that some examples do exist of the use of Piagetian ideas
which result in significantly different learning results and such useage is
not widespread in physics teaching.  So, what are *all* the possible
explanations for this picture?

I have translated "better instruction" as instruction that results in
changes in students by some measure.  Yet, the sentence in which the
phrase, "better instruction," is used only explicitly refers to instructor
time.  Is my translation appropriate?  Hmm...

While the popularizers of Piaget's ideas in the 70's focused on stage
theory and explaining limits, explaining limits was not what Piaget was
about and stage theory was probably never as strong in Piaget's group as it
was in America.  Yet, Maurice's characterization and comparison between
American college students and Piaget's observations of adolescents in his
own work stands.  There are a number of examples that illustrate that young
children can engage in kinds of thought which in traditional school
settings we sometimes feel lucky if we see them in college students.  Some
examples:  the work of Cobb, Wood, and Yackel in elementary school
mathematics, the work of Hennessey in elementary school science, Papert and
others with Logo, diSessa and group with Boxer.  Which might it be:  The
American college student is incapable of more sophisticated thinking or the
educational system is such that it is unlikely to foster such thinking in
the students?

Finally, near as I understand it from Piaget's examples, responses in which
the subject seemed not to go beyond what was specifically observable and
not to make use of imagined, but as yet unrealized combinations of
observable objects were characterized as examples of concrete operational
thinking.  Responses in which the subject imagined things beyond those
specifically observable or experienced and who coordinated all possible
combinations of observable or imagined entities were characterized as
formal operational thinking.  These categories and labels were
phenomenological, which is to say, they were noticed as patterns or ways of
characterizing the subjects' responses.  The labels were not intended to
suggest that the stages were considered to have the visceral, concrete
existence implied by many popularizers of Piaget's ideas in English.  There
is a very interesting book on this titled, Piaget & Knowledge by Hans
Furth.  Some of Piaget's more recent work only now being published in the
last 5 - 10 years in English translation touches on these issues too.


*Zollman published an article in TPT a while back and there are many
studies of the learning effects from the SCIS program from back in the 70's.

Dewey

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Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr.                   Phone: (208)385-3105
Professor of Physics                    Dept:  (208)385-3775
Department of Physics/SN318             Fax: (208)385-4330
Boise State University                  dykstrad@varney.idbsu.edu
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"Physical concepts are the free creations of the human mind and
are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external
world."--A. Einstein in The Evolution of Physics with L. Infeld,
1938

"Don't mistake your watermelon for the universe."  --K. Amdahl in
There Are No Electrons, 1991.
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