-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Clark [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Sunday, November 21, 1999 12:42 AM
Cc: TIPS
Subject: Re: Teaching uncertainty
HI
On Sat, 20 Nov 1999, Jeff Ricker wrote:
> It seems to me that a particular motivation--the need for certainty--is
> a primary determinant of the spread of irrational popular beliefs within
> the wider culture.
Perry studied student development in Universities and found that
students (on average, of course) progressed from absolutist
thinking to relativistic thinking. Some small percentage went
beyond relativism to reasoned commitment. He actually had more
stages but this is my memory of the gist. A large part of what
we do as university teachers is to help students question why
they believe what they do. There is no reason to question
something that you are certain about, so a first step is probably
provoking some uncertainty (e.g., evidence problematic for the
accepted view).
Jim,
In about 1988 T. Dary Erwin published "The Scale for Intellectual
Development" which measures the original three levels reported by Perry for
Harvard and added a fourth, higher level. Since 1989, we have given the SID
to all PSYC 101 students. Although there are problems with interpretation of
such cohort data, we recently had reason to look at a cross section of those
data. We discovered that unlike the original populations, our students come
to college more relativistic than dualistic, and more relativistic now than
ten years ago. In brief, they arrive holding the position, "everything is
relative," rather than the earlier schema which Perry called dualism. As an
initial speculation, we hypothesize that students are coming to us already
infected with post-modernist world views. They have not advanced to what
Perry called "committed." On the other and fewer of them are still locked
in to dualistic/absolutistic thinking. An, in progress, student project
which described professors whose behaviors typify each of Perry's three
levels, strongly suggests than students would prefer to be taught by
relativist as opposed to dualistic professors.
For more about the SID see:
http://www.jmu.edu/assessment/
Al
Al L. Cone
Jamestown College <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
North Dakota 701.252.3467 X 2604
http://www.jc.edu/users/faculty/cone
