Chapter 15: Second Year Evaluation of the ADAPT Program

The purpose of the present paper is to evaluate the success of the ADAPT program in reaching its goals during the second year. As in the first year of the program, the primary goal was to encourage students to think critically and logically, Secondly, we were interested in providing successful learning experiences that would facilitate personal and social growth. Finally, we hoped that students who were being encouraged to explore a variety of content areas, would feel excitement in learning, and that this would be reflected in positive attitudes toward the whole university community. In short, our goals were to encourage abstract, formal thought patterns, to facilitate personal growth, and to cultivate positive attitudes toward the university

Chapter 1: Piaget\u27s Theory and College Teaching

The influence that Piaget\u27s theory has had on the understanding of cognitive development is incalculable. One can look at the establishment of the Jean Piaget Society, the publication of literally hundreds of books that deal with Piagetian theory, and the dominance in professional journals of articles related to Piagetian theory as some indication of the immense impact that this theory has had on the study of the child\u27s acquisition of knowledge. It is, however. only very recently that college and university professors have looked toward Piagetian theory for relevant and practical suggestions about how to maximize college student learning

Chapter 14: Evaluation Report of the First Year of the ADAPT Program

Evaluating the success of the ADAPT program seemed, at the outset, to be an extremely complex task. How does one assess a student’s growth in six different content areas over a year’s time? what are the hallmarks of progress which might signal the success or failure of the program? The first step of the evaluation was a clear enumeration of the goals of the program. In staff discussions it became clear that our primary goal was to encourage students to think critically and logically by devising a curriculum which required the students to actively participate in their learning and to explore substantive concepts within the six content areas. Secondly, we were interested in providing successful learning experiences that would facilitate personal and social growth. Finally, we hoped that students who were being encouraged to explore a variety of content areas would feel the excitement of learning and that this would be reflected in positive attitudes toward the whole university community. In short, our goals were to encourage abstract, formal thought patterns to facilitate personal qrowth and to cultivate positive attitudes toward the university

Can physics develop reasoning?

The life of every physicist is punctuated by events that lead him to discover that the way physicists see natural phenomena is different from the way non-physicists see them. Certain patterns of reasoning appear to be more common among physicists than in other groups. These include: • focusing on the important variables (such as the force that accelerates the apple, rather than the lump it makes on your head); • propositional logic ( if heat were a liquid it would occupy space and a cannon barrel could only contain a limited amount of heat, but this is contrary to my observations, so . . . ), and • proportional reasoning (for example, the restoring force of a spring increases linearly with its displacement from equilibrium). In recent studies of the reasoning used by students we have discovered among them qualitative differences similar to those between the reasoning patterns of physicists and non-physicists