Essays from and about the ADAPT Program

Learning by Design: Constructing Experiential Learning Programs

Daniela Weinberg et al. — Tue, 24 May 2011 14:50:56 PDT

How can we assure that our students really learn? If we want to improve the learning process, we'll have to decide what we mean by "learn." Recall a time when you learned
something new -- a new skill, a new technique, a new word, a new hobby, a new way of interacting with people and consider the following three questions:

First, why did you bother? . You knew that learning would change you, and that change meant stress. Why would anyone volunteer for additional stress?

Second, how dld you feel during the learning process? Was it difficult or easy? Was it a delight or a bore?

Third, what was the outcome? Did your behavior change? Did it stay changed or did it fade? Would you consider it a successful learning experience?

Constructing Solutions to the Problem of Solving Physics Problems

Robert Fuller — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:11:02 PDT

In this presentation I will lift up for you some of the tentative answers that have been found to the question of how do people solve physics problems. This presentation is as much inspirational as it is informational. It is the intent of these remarks to provoke you into investigating the current research on how people really do solve physics problems.

What You Think Is What You Get: Metaphors for the University, e.g. the land grant university as a feedlot

Robert Fuller — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:05:37 PDT

All of us have mental images, or models, we use to help us understand our experiences, predict future events, and decide what to do next. Most of us have been trained in an academic discipline that has provided us with a whole range of models and their associated vocabulary. Sometimes it is helpful to take those professional images and words into an area of human behavior for which they may not have been intended and to explore what facets of that behavior they help us see in new ways.

Seeing Myself As A Scholar

Robert Fuller — Mon, 23 May 2011 13:52:52 PDT

There are many ways to see myself.
In this booklet I can begin to consider four different views of myself as
a personal scholar,
a reasoning scholar,
a knowledgeable scholar and
an autonomous scholar.

To be human is to be alive, to grow, to change.

As I grow, mature and develop, I build an ever more complex understanding of myself and my relationship to the world. My understanding is shaped by my parents and my friends, by my personal experiences and by my mental struggles to make sense of it all.

Having a sense of wonder is my beginning of wisdom.
Having my own wonderful ideas is my birth as a scholar.

On the next four pages are discussions of four different mirrors I can use to look at myself ...

Piaget and Poetry: Formal Thinking in the Humanities

James A. McShane — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:08:33 PDT

My argument in its broadest outline is not surprising: sophisticated poetry requires formal operations. Poems are, after all, statements of a propositional nature, verbal constructs of carefully integrated parts, often non-linear in their arrangements, analogical (analogy itself requiring proportional reasoning) in their presentation, and (as Aristotle noted) dependent for their intelligibility on the reader's judgment of the contextually probable. What interests me is the number of ways the Piagetian analysis of pre-formal thought illuminates those often disturbing readings, to our eyes unfathomable readings, which we are given by our less proficient students. I am further interested in what Piaget has to tell us about the intellectual skills our students must learn to become adept as readers and about how we can nurture such learning.

My mode of exploring these issues was to assess reader responses to a variety of questions about Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias" [See Appendix 1). My hypothesis was that the poem, although its regular appearance in anthologies suggests that it is not one of great difficulty, makes demands beyond the capacity of those who do not bring formal operations to bear on it. In particular, it requires the reader several times to think reversibly; that is , in this case, to generate one meaning for a set of words and to sustain that meaning while considering those words afresh and generating another, complementary, meaning,

Proportional Reasoning and Success on College Science Examinations

Melvin C. Thornton et al. — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:23:10 PDT

Puzzles testing proportional reasoning were done by twenty-five hundred students in beginning science courses. Responses indicated each student's stage of intellectual development a la Piaget. Final examination questions demanding either formal reasoning or only concrete reasoning were given in the same courses. Examination performance and proportional reasoning ability are correlated.

Chapter 11: Reading and Writing and Piaget

Robert D. Narveson — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:18:44 PDT

Like most English teachers I have been skeptical of schemes to reform the teaching of literature and composition. Our experience suggests that for the most part our successes are likely to result from the intangibles of personal styles, developed empirically through classroom practice. As Ross Winterowd has written, "One can only conclude that writing is far too difficult a skill to be taught—and yet we do teach it.” (1975, p.2) Nevertheless, I seized the opportunity to join the ADAPT Program because it seemed to offer a more thoroughly articulated theoretical basis for teaching and learning than I had previously experienced. The program was particularly attractive because it provided a context within which one could proceed intelliqently from the insight that what we do is not so much to teach writing or critical reading as to stimulate students to develop their capacities to write effectively and read critically. In the crucial matter of providing an environment favorable for learning, the ADAPT staff would be guided by Jean Piaget’s theories of human intellectual development. Within the diversity of courses we would offer, we would try to provide a more coherent structure of experiences than students usually encounter at a large public university. I expected no miracles. I foresaw, nevertheless, a promising setting in which the general intellectual maturity of students miqht be enhanced, and thus their particular capacities as readers and writers as well.

Chapter 10: ADAPT Anthropology

Martin Q. Peterson — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:03:39 PDT

ADAPT Anthropology focuses on the discovery of various social “rules” that govern social relationships. These rules are investigated through a combination of observation and participation, a traditional method in anthropology. Students use the learning cycle paradigm, first exploring relationships between people and events, then inventing new combinations of these events as a means of informing the relationships, and finally applying what they have learned to a new set of events. In this essay, I shall consider three elements of my approach to Piagetian learning in anthropology. The first element is the successful use of the learning cycle paradigm. The second element is the difference between a quantative based learning cycle, as in physics or mathematics, and a qualitative based learning cycle, as in anthropology and other non-physical or natural scieuces. The third element is the difference in task group focus of students.

Chapter 8: A Place for Philosophy in the ADAPT Program

Elizabeth T. Carpenter — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:57:17 PDT

Although there are many ways in which the ADAPT program is importantly different from other educational programs in the United States at this mid-seventies time, surely it stands as impressive in higher education by being the only college program spanning six disciplines which seeks primarily to employ the genetic epistemology of Jean Piaget in diagnostic and teaching strategies. It stands as a testing ground for a revolutionary hypothesis about college-level education: the degree of effectiveness of a teaching strategy depends directly upon the logical ability of the individual learner and his place on the developmental continuum relative to the logical demands presupposed by the assignment.

Chapter 7: The Inexpensive Unification of Clio and Piaget

L. C. Duly — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:19:13 PST

The ADAPT History course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is still very much in its infancy. To date it has consisted of a two-semester course dealing with the nature of “revolution and other forms of change" in Modern Europe from 1776 to the present. The thematic tone of its title has been kept deliberately vague; its content has tended to stress the origin, development, and change of ideas, institutions, and value-structures within the established chronology, all of which one would likely find in the traditional “Western Civilization” course. The course has not attempted to present the study of man in some new mode or to create a multimedia framework. It has benefited from being a part of the ADAPT project in that students have had opportunities to bring in to the course discoveries and experiences gained in their other academic work, However, the instruments of the course have been only those of one instructor and a typical selection of about 30 freshmen students one would find in any other history course at the University. Yet because of the utilization of Piagetian learning concepts, the course is a marked departure from existing courses in the department's program. An index of its worth at this point would lead one to suggest that it may meet the criteria expected by the profession: a limited investment of time and money; a relatively easy application of its format to other history courses and to other groupings of university students; and the maintenance of the discipline's commitment to scholarship. Since Piaget has already found its place within the learning programs of many high school and primary school curricula, the ADAPT course may also provide a vehicle of communication so necessary among teachers of history at all levels in the American educational structure.

Chapter 16: A Sneak Preview of ADAPT'S Third-Year Evaluation

David Moshman et al. — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:01:38 PST

The evaluation of the ADAPT program for the academic year 1977–78 will be based on pre- and post-test data for 19 ADAPT students and 24 control students on four measures—the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Questionnaire, the Self Description Inventory, the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, and a test of Formal Operational Reasoning—as well as an attitude questionnaire given to both groups at the end of the year. Detailed analyses of the results from both the ADAPT program and the other Piagetian programs described in this volume are currently being performed by Carol Tomlinson- Keasey, who is now at the University of California-Riverside. We can at this point, however, briefly describe the measures used and present some preliminary results.

Chapter 15: Second Year Evaluation of the ADAPT Program

C. A. Tomlinson-Keasey et al. — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:57:22 PST

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

C. A. Tomlinson-Keasey et al. — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:48:04 PST

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.

Chapter 1: Piaget's Theory and College Teaching

C. A. Tomlinson-Keasey — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:37:04 PST

The influence that Piaget's 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's 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.

Theories of Piaget, Who Died this Month, Inspire Growing Band of U.S. Professors

Robert L. Jacobson — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:23:43 PDT

The death of Jean Piaget this month at the age of 84 came at a time when the Swiss psychologist's theories of cognitive development were inspiring a small but growing number of innovative instructional programs in American colleges and universities. Most were started within the past few years and have yet to produce much hard evidence of their effectiveness. But participating faculty members say they are excited about what has been happening in their classrooms.

"Piagetian-based instruction," they say, offers many potential advantages over traditional methods: It facilitates communication, improves students' reasoning ability and academic achievement, boosts their self-confidence and interest in their work, and provides a practical basis for integrating different subjects in a curriculum through a common emphasis on cognitive skills.

Preliminary research findings indicate that students in such programs make significantly greater gains on tests of critical thinking than do their counterparts in other classes. Teachers also report that attendance is up and attrition is down for students in the special classes, which encompass many disciplines in both the sciences and the humanities.

"It's a movement that is coming in higher education," says one enthusiast. So far about a dozen colleges are conducting formal Piagetian programs, while faculty members at a number of other institutions are believed to be drawing on Piaget independently in their teaching. The formal programs, which range from a single course to a full year of study, have attracted financial support from the federal government and private foundations.

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Thu, 01 Nov 2007 12:52:38 PDT

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Epilogue: THE MAN WHO MADE THE WORLD SAFE FOR EPISTEMOLOGY

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 12:29:56 PDT

. . . I turned to Piaget. "Have you anything to say to the Nebraska populace?"

Piaget tipped his beret, toked briefly, and stepped to the waiting microphone. "My dear fellow-knowers: Let me just remind you once again that the pyramid of knowledge neither rests on its base of data nor hangs from its vertex of theory but rather floats in midair in an ever-expanding dynamic equilibrium."

The crowd roared, cheered, and burst into song: . . .

Chapter 18: ADAPT: A View from a Distant Campus

John A. Ricketts — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:37:41 PDT

My association with the ADAPT faculty brought home the idea that in order to be effective in the classroom, the instructor must ascertain the cognitive level of the students. Teaching formal concepts to concrete operational students is useless; hence, diagnosis of student weaknesses is imperative if the student is to progress up the cognitive ladder.

I want to thank those in the ADAPT program for altering my view on the teaching-learning experience. Without their philosophy and their concern, I would still be teaching formal concepts to concrete students and wondering why they couldn't grasp these concepts. Now I am aware of these learning differences and try to spot that person who isn’t quite ready, and whenever possible, attempt to suggest ways that the student can increase his or her cognitive abilities.

Chapter 17: Learning Cycles and Anthropology

Ellen Dubas — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:34:28 PDT

We can rarely send students to live in cultures we want them to learn about. Yet all of them are proficient in living in their own culture. Since I am asking them to do fieldwork in a culture that they are extremely well acquainted with, they are able to assume a level of competence and confidence that gives them great interest in the cultural system they are manipulating.

A learning cycle in anthropology consists of three stages: exploration, invention and application. One exploration phase of a learning cycle is cultural anthropology consists of, firstly, asking students to put their last names on the blackboard. I then ask them to do something meaningful with the last names, for example make a conclusion about American culture. Eventually students will conclude that the last names give an indication of national origin of the people in the room. The national origin of each person is investigated and then I ask them what conclusion they can make from the names. Ultimately, depending on what part of the country one is in they will conclude that there is a dominant group that appears on the board. In Nebraska, that group is English, with German a close second. In Albuquerque, it would be Spanish and English co-dominantly ruling the board. The final conclusion from this exercise is that the United States has a wide variety of peoples who have been acculturated under a dominant cultural system.

Chapter 16: The ADAPT Workshop and Its Legends

Robert Fuller — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:04:58 PDT

Almost from its beginning, the ADAPT project had faculty development workshops as one of its products. Early in the ADAPT project the staff agreed that ADAPT was not a set of curricular materials to be developed and marketed. Rather the ADAPT faculty saw the insights gained from Piaget’s work as a different way of understanding college teaching. This understanding may manifest itself in active learning classroom exercises based on the Learning Cycle. Perhaps, more importantly, the constructivism of Piaget transforms the mission of the college teacher and it provides clues to proper teaching behaviors. The best way to share the Piagetian ideas with others is through an active learning experience. Hence, the workshop on College Teaching and the Development of Reasoning was developed by the ADAPT faculty. The Development of Reasoning workshops date back to December of 1973. At that time, Professor Robert Karplus was putting together a proposal to the National Science Foundation to develop a workshop on Piaget for physics teachers. After a visit to Lincoln in 1973 he invited me to serve on that AAPT task force to develop the workshop. During that same time our team at Nebraska was writing our proposal to submit to the Exxon Education Foundation. It was only natural that we include a workshop for our UNL colleagues in the proposal.

In many ways our present workshop is the same as the original workshop constructed by Karplus and the AAPT task force in 1974. The first workshop, Physics Teaching and the Development of Reasoning, was offered at the annual AAPT-APS meeting in Anaheim, California in January of 1975. Almost all of the content in our present two-day workshop was in that first workshop. It was offered in a three-hour period. More than 100 physics teachers walked through the workshop that first time.