-----Original Message-----
From: Paul C. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Sunday, November 21, 1999 8:20 AM
To: 'TIPS'
Subject: RE: Teaching uncertainty
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
Paul,
Up to here, she sounds a lot like Perry.
Evaluativism -
Personal uncertainty
Possibility of, interest in, and tools for reconciliation of
divergent
views.
And this second one sort of appears in the crack between Relativism and
Commitment. I don't have Perry at home, but his table of the stages provides
for gradations between them. I'm not defending him; your criticisms are, I
think, valid as to his population. But also, we must consider that times
have changed.
Former TIPSter John Newman developed and validated a scale measuring
essentially these same factors (SAID-60 - the Scale of Adult Intellectual
Development).
If you guys are still in school next week would you be so kind as to send
these references. I know I can track them down, but if you've got them handy
it would help me. We are closed for the whole week, and getting anything
through the library will be a pain. However, my wife who is reference
librarian for the State Library over in Bismarck is coming home Tuesday
night for Thanksgiving, and she could get them and bring them over.
Al
Al L. Cone
Jamestown College <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
North Dakota 701.252.3467 X 2604
http://www.jc.edu/users/faculty/cone
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
