Al Cone wrote:
Jim Clark wrote:
> 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.
This is an interesting finding (read: it confirms my preconceptions). :)
I remember reading about failed attempts to use Perry's stages with less
unusual populations (he used _only_ students at Harvard, right? And do I
remember correctly that he only used males?).
There are other similar systems describing the epistemological development
of college-aged persons, including an empirically-based one using a more
normal sample, detailed in Deanna Kuhn's wonderful "The Skills of Argument"
(1991). She recognizes three stages:
Absolutism -
Experts can or do know with certainty
The absolutist him/herself has personal certainty
The absolutist has no resources for reconciling divergent views
Multiplism -
There is no meaningful expertise
The multiplist nonetheless has personal certainty
Beliefs are like possessions - the response to attempts to change beliefs
is like the response to having a possession stolen
Beliefs are all equally well-founded
The multiplist is indifferent to the notion of reconciliation of divergent
views
Evaluativism -
Personal uncertainty
Possibility of, interest in, and tools for reconciliation of divergent
views
Former TIPSter John Newman developed and validated a scale measuring
essentially these same factors (SAID-60 - the Scale of Adult Intellectual
Development).
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
