College Student Development and Academic Life

Psychological, Intellectual, Social and Moral Issues

Philip G. Altbach, Karen Arnold, Ilda Carreiro King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135644499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The purpose of this series is to bring together the main currents in today's higher education and examine such crucial issues as the changing nature of education in the U.S., the considerable adjustment demanded of institutions, administrators, the faculty; the role of Catholic education; the remarkable growth of higher education in Latin America, contemporary educational concerns in Europe, and more. Among the many specific questions examined in individual articles are: Is it true that women are subtly changing the academic profession? How is power concentrated in academic organizations? How successful are Latin America's private universities? What is the correlation between higher education and employment in Spain? Is minority graduate education in the U.S. producing the desired results?

Cognitive and Ethical

3

William G. Perry, Jr

Cognitive and Ethical Growth:

The Making of Meaning

Have you received the latest “printout” of your students’ evaluation of your teaching from the computer? If so, I trust you are properly encouraged. But my intent is to raise the possibility that those comfortable “means” and “standard deviations” may conceal unexamined educational riches. In the usual form of such evaluations, the shortness of the scale (commonly five or seven points, from superb to awful), the neatness of the standard deviations, and the comfort of the mean inspire in us all a confidence that further analysis would tell us little. Indeed, our friends assure us that even those vagaries in our students’ opinions that prevent the mean ratings from being as high as we had hoped can be chalked up to our credit under the rubric, “The best teacher never pleases everybody.”

Surely it seems reasonable enough to average check marks on items like

	1	2	3	4	5
Organization of assignments:	Excellent	Good	Fair	Poor	Very Bad

and to print 1.9 as the mean. But if you have ever given your students an opportunity to be more expansive, you can never again be wholly comforted. What can you do with such unaverageable judgments as “This course has changed my whole outlook on education and life! Superbly taught! Should be required of all students!” and “This course is falsely advertised and dishonest. You have cheated me of my tuition!”

Over the years I have received just such comments at the end of a noncredit course on Strategies of Reading, when I asked, “What did you expect of this course?” (big space) and “What did you find?” (big space). I do not ask the students for their names, just for their scores on pre-and post-tests. Twenty years ago I reported on the course in a faculty meeting (Perry, 1959) and read one student’s comment as my punch line. Since the student had scored 20 percent comprehension at 120 words per minute on pre-test and 90 percent comprehension at 600 words per minute on post-test, I had looked forward to some flattery. What I found was, “I expected an organized effort to improve my reading,” followed by, “This has been the most sloppy, disorganized course I’ve never taken. Of course I have made some improvement (arrow to the scores), but this has been due entirely to my own efforts.” This got a good laugh from the faculty, largely, I suspect, owing to the realization that “evaluations” threaten not only the vanity of teachers but their very sanity as well.

At the time, no one, myself included, stopped to inquire whether this student’s outrage bespoke more than some comical aberration. It took my colleagues and me twenty years to discover that such comments reflect coherent interpretive frameworks through which students give meaning to their educational experience. These structurings of meaning, which students revise in an orderly sequence from the relatively simple to the more complex, determine more than your students’ perception of you as teacher; they shape the students’ ways of learning and color their motives for engagement and disengagement in the whole educational enterprise. Teachers have, of course, always sensed this and have tried to teach accordingly.

This chapter illustrates, in students’ own words, the typical course of development of students’ patterns of thought. Twenty years ago, a small group of us, counselors and teachers, were so puzzled by students’ varied and contradictory perceptions of ourselves and their other teachers that we set out to document their experience. We invited volunteers to tell us, at the end of their freshman year, what had “stood out” for them. We encouraged them to talk freely in the interview without preformed questions from us, and the diversity of their reports exceeded even our own expectations. After the manner of the time, we supposed the differences arose from differences in “personality types.” However, as the same students returned to report their experience year by year, we were startled by their reinterpretations of their lives. Then these reinterpretations seemed to fall into a logical progression. Each step represented a challenge to the student’s current view of the world. Different students might respond differently, with courage or defeat, but all faced the same basic challenges to making meaning in a complex world (Perry, 1970).¹

We found that we could describe the logic or “structure” of each of these successive reinterpretations of the world and identify the challenges that precipitated them. We made a map of these challenges-a “Pilgrim’s Progress” of ways of knowing, complete with Sloughs of Despond—giving each of the successive interpretations a numbered “Position.” We then put the map to a test by giving raters a number of interviews and asking them to state for each interview that Position which seemed most congruent with the pattern of the student’s thought. Since the raters agreed strongly with one another, we knew that the developments that we had seen were there for others to see. This map of sequential interpretations of meaning, or scheme of development, has since been found to be characteristic of the development of students’ thinking throughout a variety of educational settings (see this chapter’s reference section). This chapter makes this developing sequence of interpretations explicit. Along the way, I shall suggest what I see to be the general implications of this sequence for educational practice. Readers interested in the ways these implications have found particular expression in various educational contexts can then consult the work of those researchers and practitioners whom I cite.

Scheme of Development

One naturally thinks of any scheme of development in terms of its “stages”—or “Positions,” as we called them in our own scheme. In summarizing our students’ journey for the reader of this chapter, I therefore first excised from all our students had told us a quotation or two to illustrate each Position. To my dismay, the drama died under the knife.

Then I realized that Positions are by definition static, and development is by definition movement. It was therefore the Transitions that were so fresh and intriguing. Each of the Positions was obvious and familiar in its delineation of a meaningful way of construing the world of knowledge, value, and education. The drama lived in the variety and ingenuity of the ways students found to move from a familiar pattern of meanings that had failed them to a new vision that promised to make sense of their broadening experience, while it also threatened them with unanticipated implications for their selfhood and their lives. I thus decided to select quotations illustrating for each step the breakup of the old and the intimations of the new. (Perhaps development is all transition and “stages” only resting points along the way.)

But this expansion of the summary puts severe strains on the boundaries of this chapter and on the reader. I can surely trust the reader to remember that each simple quotation stands for many intriguing variants in the ways students gave meaning to the unfolding landscapes of the journey. But we have more to do than trace the journey. I have promised to note some further thoughts on these developmental progressions—thoughts that have arisen in a decade of dialogue with others who have used our scheme as a starting point for explorations of their own. Had my briefest summary of the scheme sufficed, I could have moved on directly to commentary on other researchers’ work and on our own recent thinking about particular passages or issues in the scheme. After the more expanded summary, however, the reader and I would find ourselves too far away from the data relevant to such commentary. It has seemed best, therefore, to digress occasionally as relevant points emerge.

If the reader is to tolerate lengthy digressions at dramatic moments–as happens in early Victorian novels—I should at least give evidence in advance that I know where I am going. Figure 1 gives a synopsis, in bare bones, of our scheme of cognitive and ethical development—the evolving ways of seeing the world, knowledge and education, values, and oneself. Notice that each Position both includes and transcends the earlier ones, as the earlier ones cannot do with the later. This fact defines the movement as development rather than mere changes or “phases.” Figure 2 gives a map of this development. Following are definitions of the key terms, abstractions to which the students’ words will subsequently give life:

Figure 1. Scheme of Cognitive and Ethical Development

Dualism. Division of meaning into two realms—Good versus Bad, Right versus Wrong, We versus They, All that is not Success is Failure, and the like. Right Answers exist somewhere for every problem, and authorities know them. Right Answers are to be memorized by hard work. Knowledge is quantitative. Agency is experienced as “out there” in Authority, test scores, the Right job.

Multiplicity. Diversity of opinion and values is recognized as legitimate in areas where right answers are not yet known. Opinions remain atomistic without pattern or

Figure 2. A Map of Development

system. No judgments can be made among them so “everyone has a right to his own opinion; none can be called wrong.”

Relativism. Diversity of opinion, values, and judgment derived from coherent sources, evidence, logics, systems, and patterns allowing for analysis and comparison. Some opinions may be found worthless, while there will remain matters about which reasonable people will reasonably disagree. Knowledge is qualitative, dependent on contexts.

Commitment (uppercase C.) An affirmation, choice, or decision (career, values, politics, personal relationship) made in the awareness of Relativism (distinct from lowercase c of commitments never questioned). Agency is experienced as within the individual.

Temporizing. Postponement of movement for a year or more.

Escape: Alienation, abandonment of responsibility. Exploitation of Multiplicity and Relativism for avoidance of Commitment.

Retreat Avoidance of complexity and ambivalence by regression to Dualism colored by hatred of otherness.

I shall now let the students speak for themselves as they spoke in interviews in which we asked unstructured questions (such as “what stands out for you as you review the year?”) in order to allow the students freedom to structure their own meanings. I shall report our sense of the import of their words for the development we trace, and I shall digress on occasion to consider implications for teaching and educational policy.

Positions 1 Through 5

Position 1: Basic Duality. This is the Garden of Eden, with the same rules. Here the student is embedded in a world of We-Right-Good (Other-Wrong-Bad is “out there”). We called this Basic Duality. Right Answers for everything exist in the Absolute, and these are known to Authorities, whose role is to mediate (teach) them. Knowledge and goodness are perceived as quantitative accretions of discrete Tightnesses to be collected by hard work and obedience (including the requirement to read all assigned books word by word from the beginning). We held our interviews in May and June, and no freshman still spoke from this Position in its purest form. A few, however, saw themselves in retrospect as having come to college with this view intact. This student’s words show how hard it is to articulate an embeddedness so complete that it offered no place from which to observe it:

Student: I certainly couidn’t-before I was, you know, I wouldn’t ask. /Yeah/ I wouldn’t have-I wouldn’t be able to talk on this subject at all.… that what I had just-well, was there you know.

Only a dim sense that there is a boundary somewhere beyond which lies Otherness provides Eden with shape:

Student: Well I come, I came here from a small town. Midwest, where, well, ah, everyone believed the same things. Everyone’s Methodist and everyone’s Republican. So, ah, there just wasn’t any … well that’s not quite true … there are some Catholics, two families, and I guess they, I heard they were Democrats, but they weren’t really, didn’t seem to be in town really, I guess. They live over the railroad there and they go to church in the next town.

But obedience is the Way:

Student: Well the only thing I could say to a prospective student is just say, “If you come here and do everything you’re supposed to do, you’ll be all right,” that’s just about all.

But such innocence is short-lived:

Transition from Position 1 to Position 2. The first challenge often comes from peers:

Student: When I went to my first lecture, what the man said was just like God’s word, you know. I believe everything he said, because he was a professor, and he’s a Harvard professor, and this was, this was a respected position. And, ah, ah, people said, “Well, so what?” … and I began to, ah, realize.

And especially in the dorm:

Student: So in my dorm I, we’ve been, ah, [in] a number of discussions, where there’ll be, well, there’s quite a variety in our dorm, Catholic, Protestant, and the rest of them, and a Chinese boy whose parents, ah, follow the teachings of Confucianism. He isn’t, but his folks are … And a couple of guys are complete, ah, agnostics, agnostics. Of course, some people are quite disturbing, they say they’re atheists. But they don’t go very far, they say they’re atheists, but they’re not. And then there are, one fellow, who is a deist. And by discussing it, ah, it’s the, the sort of thing that, that really, ah, awakens you to the fact that, ah …

Diversity, experienced among peers and again in the classroom, must now be accounted for. Difference of opinion surely cannot exist in the Absolute. If earthly Authorities disagree, perhaps some are mere pretenders? Or do They put all the complexities in there just to exercise our minds? Such interpretations of diversity deny it a full legitimacy and preserve the simplicity of Truth:

Position 2: Multiplicity Prelegitimate. True authority may perform its proper role of direct mediation while complexities confuse pretenders:

Student: For one thing, Professor Black who taught us [in First Term] … Christmas! you couldn’t lose him on one point. Man, he wouldn’t, you couldn’t, you couldn’t find a question he coul...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Volume Introduction
• Personal Growth and the College Student
• Cognitive and Ethical
• Identity in Context
• Person in Context
• Acknowledgments