All learning, particularly higher learning, is premised on the notion that there is such a thing as truth and that it is eminently worth pursuing. All serious inquiries into the various branches of human knowledge have the discovery and dissemination of truth as their end goals. The humanities are no exception. In the last several decades,…

Humility, in a variety of forms, has been examined in educational contexts in recent years. However, its association with a particular pedagogical method remains an unexplored area of inquiry. Likewise, social justice and student voice are a concern in international education arenas, including in higher education, but are not usually connected to…

Introductory students regularly endorse "naïve skepticism" -- unsupported or uncritical doubt about the existence and universality of truth -- for a variety of reasons. Though some of the reasons for students' skepticism can be traced back to the student -- for example, a desire to avoid engaging with controversial material or a desire…

While the number of refugees in tertiary education remains small in comparison to the total number of refugee youths, with 1% of university-students worldwide, their social, economic and political impact in refugee societies is believed to be significant. Yet, the role of higher education in their socialisation, the way humanitarian actors invest…

Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each…

The publication of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's influential new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," the findings of which were summarized in an article by the same authors in the March/April "Change," has caused a national furor centering around their multi-institutional findings that the…

A question that captured our attention many years ago and continues to motivate our work, although the audience for that work has expanded and contracted over the years, is "What about reading?" In this essay we adopt a term used to frame discussion at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)--remix--to revisit in three…

Research examining the influence of collaborative learning experiences on students' intellectual development has been somewhat inconclusive and largely based on samples of white, traditional-aged college students. Using data from the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (Pace, 1990), the author examines this relationship for a random sample…

Presents initial data from 725 college and university students on the construct validity of the Learning Environmental Preferences (LEP) instrument. Findings suggest that the LEP accurately measures the cognitive portion of the Perry scheme of intellectual development. (Author/TE)

This research examined the relationship between types of perfectionists and differences in post-adolescent intellectual development. University students completed the Almost Perfect Scale-Revised (Slaney, Rice, Mobley, Trippi, & Ashby, 2001) and the Scale of Adult Intellectual Development (Newman & Martin, 1999). The results revealed significant…

The focus of this study is how educational leadership can respond to the emerging spiritual culture amongst college students in the United States as documented by the recent study published by the University of California--Los Angeles (UCLA) Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). The suggestion in this work is that the evolving notion of…

Use of Perry's developmental scheme to test college students' intellectual development found that instead of developmental stages, there are two possible general attitudes taken toward knowledge: it (1) consists of facts to be supplied by faculty; or (2) is a quest in which students have responsibility for their own learning. (Author/MSE)

The knowledge era demands that students and faculty analyze and organize information, which requires intellectual skills rooted in critical thinking, problem solving, formal operations, creative, and more recent metacognitive and cognitive concepts. These skills seem to have operations in common, including description, selection, representation,…

Results compiled from several studies indicate that college students place significant personal emphasis on matters related to spirituality. Compiling students' responses from the author's 2003 pilot study, subsequent focus group interviews, and the 2004 national survey, along with faculty's responses from the 2004-2005 Higher Education Research…

Over the past 30 years, research on how college impacts student development has continually pointed to the peer group as perhaps the dominant change agent during the college years. A college student's peers act as a reference group, or an environmental source of sociocultural norms in the midst of which a student grows and develops (Clark & Trow,…