The lower division and the upper division are both reasonably well understood categories of students. In the Paradigms Program, we focus on the special needs of the middle division, i.e. those students who have just finished the lower-division introductory courses and are in the process of transitioning into the upper-division courses for majors. Some of the characteristics of middle-division students are:

• They already know something about many topics, but that information may be difficult to access or poorly organized.
• They must learn many professional skills (to use physical reasoning, solve long problems, visualize in 3-d, tie theory to experiment, gain perspective and scale, and learn to generalize their results appropriately) in addition to learning lots of new content.
• They tend to misapply or over-generalize the resources that they do have.
• Many have low self confidence.
• Many are unfamiliar with using metacognition in their problem solving. They have difficulty “settling,” i.e. knowing when they know something and have difficulty monitoring their logic when making a theoretical argument.