Piaget's stages of reasoning

A brief outline of Piaget’s theory and how it relates to physics can be found here.

A large part of the instructor’s job seems to be convincing students in the concrete stage of reasoning that they really are in the concrete stage and that there really is value in achieving a formal stage of reasoning. This should be accomplished through very carefully crafted experiments and questions that show the student the failings of her current concrete reasoning. Often students in the concrete stage think they understand something perfectly and convincing them there’s a more general way to explain something they already have an answer for is not going to work. You need to show them the failings of their current reasoning/model of the world. It would be interesting to see how well this matches with the Univ. of Washington tutorials.

The references used for this topic are all about 30 years old. Not sure what has happened to the use of Piaget’s theory in the past 30 years. Some evidence that the stages of development are not being linked to particular ages anymore.

Again and again we keep coming back to the question of how do you motivate students who don’t want to learn physics. There are many more students who like the idea of physics (think black holes etc. are interesting) than like physics classes. It would be a great accomplishment just to get all the students who like physics to like physics classes. Next semester need to look at how driving questions and classes focused on reasoning rather than specific physics content could allow you to talk conceptually about situations students find interesting.