Piagetian‐styled and process‐based physics lecture course for liberal arts majors Available to Purchase

The recent surge of evidence that a good percentage of incoming college students have not fully reached the Piagetian stage of intellectual development necessary for scientific abstraction has prompted the reorganization of a ten‐week introductory physics course for liberal arts majors at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Without a formal laboratory, this course now attempts, through a specific scheme of lecture demonstrations and homework problems, to involve the students with the material of the discipline in a manner consistent with Piagetian developmental psychology. The developmental scheme is maintained within an instructional framework that emphasizes the historical processes involved in concept formation as well as the humanistic side of the physics discipline. The initial results, obtained through a student questionnaire and departmental survey, suggest physics understanding and appreciation.