ADAPT Program (Accent on Developing Abstract Processes of Thought)
Date of this Version
October 1982
Abstract
In concluding this chapter, I want to try to generalize on my experience with the physics component of ADAPT and try to express my impressions about what has happened in the other ADAPT disciplines during this project. I would like to believe that professors who think formally about their discipline are able to sit down in a quiet place and carefully analyze the structure of their discipline into a sequence of topics that increase montonically in terms of the level of reasoning required of the students. However, I think our experiences in teaching the ADAPT program indicate otherwise. We can evolve college courses that encourage the cognitive self-regulation process with the content topics of our discipline. The response of our students provides the disequilibrating force and, I hope, our continued efforts at improving our program keeps us nearly equilibrated. Finally, the task of evolving an effective college program for the development of college students reasoning abilities is much larger than the ADAPT program. We want to encourage many other faculty members who are engaged in a similar evolutionary process to share their insights and successes with us. Then, at last, perhaps we can impose some order upon the apparent chaos of our present efforts.