edited by: GRACE FISHERMCGUFFIE
curriculum report
Notfhwestern Htgh School Hyattsvtlle. Maryland 20782
An Investigation of Piagetian Stages in Italian Secondary Paolo Violino lstituto di Fisica. Universitd di Pisa. Pisa, ltaly Beatrice Semlno Dl Giacomo V. Rustichello 5, 56100 Pisa, ltaly In recent vears a considerable interest has been shown in the investigation of the level of psychological development of secondary schml and college students, since it has been shown that the Piagetian stage of formal operations is reached by many students much later than originally stated by Piaget himself. This problem is, of course, of the utmost importance in science teaching, as it has been discussed in detail in several papers.' T h e existing data on psychological development as a function of age have been obtained hoth with oral interviews as described by Piaget (3)and hy means of written tests. Such written tests, although less accurate, have been devised as substitutes of the oral interviews, since the latter require hiehlv " " skilled and exoerienced oersonnel and a rather lone time for each interview, and thus cannot reasonably he used in the investieation of iaree samoles. There is now a wide variety of such tests, ranging from the so-called "class tasks" used hv Shaver and coworkers ( 4 ) .that are essentiallv classical l'iagrtinn t i j i k i adapted iur evaiuat ing large samples, to many ouzzlt,s like the weli.known ilnnds Puzzle orie~nilllvde*crlhed . by K a r p l u ~down , ~ to very crude questionnaires used by some workers. Many papers dealing with such procedures for assessing the stage of reasoning are listed hy Good and others (I). A comparison among the results of such investigations is rather difficult, since there are too many variables changing from one work to another: experimental technique, expertise of the investigators, cultural and social background of the students, school systems, and so on. It is fairly obvious that in such circumstances the existence of a general agreement amone these evaluations would vield a sort of crosscheck and show that the results are fairly independent from the details of the method used in the investieations. Such a com~arison seems, therefore, of particular interest now since several authors are auestionine the validitv of Piaeet's theorv or its applicability to educational problems. In order to he able to compare these results, however, it is necessary that the data he taken on rather large samples; otherwise the statistical errors grow too large. Even though there are many works dealing with various aspects of these problems, there are rather few experimental works on the evaluation of the reasoning stages in large samples of young people during the critical age of transition to the formal op~
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A resource paper discurfiing the literature on this subject has recently heen printed in THIS JOURNAL( I ) . Several references to teachine can he found in reference similar work related to .ohvsics . t
(2).
'Several such puzzles have been developed or adapted by the American Association of Physics Teachers and are described in ref-
erational stage (13-14 to 17-19 years). The existing works dealing with large samples refer mainly to selected samples of American college students or representative samples of British middle and secondary school children. In order to get some information on the Piagetian stages of Italian secondary school students, we have administered several written puzzles to a sample of 580 Italian pupils hetween the ages of 13 and 20 years, belonging to all major types of ltalian secondary schools, including one terminal class of the middle school and one class of freshmen in a college. The students were distributed in seven cities in Northern and Central Italy, ranging in size from a city with over one million inhabitants to a village. The sample is, however, not entirely representative in a statistical sense, since the individual classes have been selected by expediency iavailahility of teachers willing to carry out this activity). The particular age range was chosen hecause in Italy there is now discussion about a reform of the school system for students between age 14 and 18,and also hecause we wished to compare our results hoth with the British results hy Shayer and Wylam (6) up to age 15and with several American results a t college level. We administered several puzzles to the same student in order to cross-check the results with the different puzzles and thus limit the larger error margin that is inherent with written puzzles as compared with oral interviews. The five puzzles we used are those described hy Collea and others (5). In order to describe students as formal or concrete thinkers, we essentially followed the guidelines given by these authors. However. we tried to mark them accordine to the orieinal classificatim hy 1'iayt.t of t he development t n g w as 2A. 2H. :!A. .IH The rQ4DwlaQshnw heen marked in(lt~t~endentiv IIS each author (a siientist and a psychologist) andevery cabe
