Listdwellers:
On Friday I attended an inservice at Santa Monica College where a colleague
presented some interesting material on stages of adult cognitive development.
It was an attempt to define the development of "reflective judgment" in
adults in stages that continue through and past "Piaget Stage 4," the highest
stages being characterized by an ability to recognize that certain problems
may have more than one workable solution, that experts may be limited by
their own biases or information etc. I believe that this was based upon the
stages devised by a psychologist named Fisher. On the face of it the scheme
"rang true" and made a lot of "intuitive sense" to me.
The things that troubled me about this though were the following aspects:
1) Selection bias problems - most of the people who were reaching the highest
stages were graduate students. I am not sure I buy the notion that one can
only learn reflective judgment in graduate school, though I am as "education
positive" as the next person on this list. I strongly suspect that depending
upon the ego-strength of one's mentors, for example, a graduate student could
be as easily encouraged as discouraged from deep questioning, etc.
2) Even more suspect to my mind was the finding that of all the scientists on
the planet, the social scientists seem to do this sort of thinking best of
all. Perhaps I am committing the "genetic fallacy" here, but when social
scientists conduct a study that suggests that social scientists are the best
reflective thinkers, I just have to pause and wonder about it.
Does anyone know of more or other work in this area? I am sorry but although
my colleague had a book about this with her, I neglected to ask for the
authors' names. Please feel free to enlighten me on or off list if I am
being too suspicious about the conclusions drawn and if there is more
evidence to back up these claims.
Happy Mother's Day to all, too.
Nancy Melucci ("Dr. Banjo")
SMC (So much confusion?)
Huntington Beach, CA
