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Despite the fact that many students enter testing at the concrete level, it
is possible to structure the course so that they improve their thinking.
This is now being routinely done in the intro. biology course at AzState.
Anton Lawson has been a prolific publisher of papers on the subject, and has
been pushing this idea for years. One of the latest papers published by one
of Lawson's collaborators mentioned that the course at AzState pushed up
student thinking by about 1 STD, which is considered to be a very large
increase. The article is Wycoff "Changing the culture of Undergraduate
Science Teaching", Jour of Coll. Sci. Teach. XXX #5 pp306-312.
I can tell you the statistics for my course. About 30% of the incoming
students are at the concrete level, but less than 15% are still at that
level when they leave. Likewise only about 15% test as formal thinkers
coming in, and about 30% test as formal thinkers going out. One might
presume that courses which have a large number of physics, engineering, or
pre-med students would have a high proportion of formal thinkers at major
universities. I would guess 40-50% or more. While at community colleges
the number would be more like 20%, and for physics for poets courses or
courses with a large number of elementary ed majors the number may be below
10%. This is purely conjecture because to my knowledge this sort of survey
has not been systematically carried out. About 30% of the students entering
the AzState general studies bio course tested at the formal level, but the
vast majority were at that level at the end of the course (if I read their
graph correctly in above mentioned paper). If we can push thinking levels
up, and as a result have more success, shouldn't we do this?