ADAPT Program (Accent on Developing Abstract Processes of Thought)
Date of this Version
October 1982
Abstract
Since the fall of 1978, my colleague, Dr. Robert G. Fuller, and I have been involved in a project to document on videotape the variety of ways in which students approach problems. We chose problems that adequate solutions of which call for the use of certain sorts of reasoning strategies. Our materials were selected to afford rich ground for investigation by subjects of a range of operational abilities. We began by doing Piagetian clinical interviews of elementary school children and then of college students. We hope, eventually, to do similar interviews of junior high and senior high school students, too, and thus to assemble videotaped programs illustrating the development of reasoning strategies and some of the "pitfalls" and "diversions" that occur along the continuum of logical development. This paper presents some of the information we gained from the interviews of college students and discusses what it may mean for higher education in the 1980s.