Accelerating the development of formal thinking in middle and high school students

Abstract

In an attempt to accelerate the development of formal operations in average young adolescents, intervention lessons relating to all formal schemata were designed in the context of school science courses. Over a period of two years, up to 30 intervention lessons were given by science teachers to their classes in eight schools. Boys who started the program aged 12+ showed a pre‐posttest effect size on Piagetian tests of 0.89 SD compared with control classes. In terms of British norms for the development of operational thinking this was a mean change from the 51st to the 74th percentile. Neither the middle school students nor the 12+ girls showed greater gain than the controls. Gains were shown by girls in one 11+ class and in the two 11+ laboratory classes. In the laboratory school students given intervention lessons by the researchers maintained their gains over controls in formal operations at a delayed posttest one year after cessation of the program. There was no effect on tests of science achievement during the intervention. It was argued that the interventions needed to be accompanied by in‐service training designed to enable teachers to change their teaching style in line with their students' increased operational thinking capacity.

Determination of Factors Related to Students’ Understandings of Heat, Temperature and Internal Energy Concepts

“…Lawson et al (2000) state that formal reasoning, which involves skills such as control of variables, proportional, probabilistic, correlational, and combinatorial reasoning in the adolescence period. In addition, Lawson et al (2000) emphasized that these skills were effective in the process when students were forming science concepts because the more developed students' logical thinking ability is, the more complex their mental schemas become (Adey & Shayer, 1990). However, Lawson and Thompson (1988) argued that students' reasoning abilities were significantly correlated with the misconceptions they had.…”

Assessment of Conceptual Demands of Basic Science Curriculum and Students’ Cognitive Development in Plateau State, Nigeria

“…Two instruments were used for data collection, namely, a Curriculum Analysis Taxonomy (CAT) developed by the researcher and Science Reasoning Tasks II (SRTs 11) adopted from [2]. In developing the CAT, the researcher carefully studied the basic science syllabus in the core curriculum for junior secondary schools.…”

A review of TRIZ and its benefits & challenges in stimulating creativity in problem solving of pre-university students: A TARUC case study

“…The teaching of TRIZ in education setting can be done through the enrichment or infusion approach (Adey and Michael, 1990;Belski et al, 2013;Shayer and Philip, 2002). In the enrichment, TRIZ is taught in parallel with existing domain-speci ic subject.…”