Undergraduate research is a way for students with minoritized racial identities to engage in a high-impact practice that increases their critical thinking, writing, and communication skills as well as their academic aspirations and retention (Bowman & Holmes, 2018). For racially minoritized students, the role of race is a critical component…

Using comparative case study methods, we analyzed longitudinal data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education to examine if and how 23 college students' capacities for intercultural maturity (ICM) changed over the course of their college experiences. Those whose capacities increased often had immersion experiences wherein they were…

College students frequently serve on boards that hear cases of alleged student misconduct. These students contribute to decisions that can affect their peers' lives and make their colleges vulnerable to litigation and negative media coverage. It is critical that student board members carefully interpret all information presented in disciplinary…

Scholars and practitioners alike often assume that discomfort is a necessary and productive aspect of the college experience. We used a range of theories grounded in the concept of dissonance to question these assumptions and critically analyze the role of discomfort in collegiate learning and development for today's diverse college student…

Gender differences among contributing student leadership development resources were examined within the context of theory-based perspectives of leadership-related attributes. The findings suggest that students' increased engagement with institutional constituencies cultivates an environment conducive to students' cognitive development toward…

This study examined 110 intercultural experiences from 82 students attending six colleges and universities to explore how students' interpretations of their intercultural experiences reflected their developmental capacities for intercultural maturity. Our analysis of students' experiences confirmed as well as refined and expanded King and Baxter…

Theories of college student and adult intellectual development have shown that learning to interpret, evaluate, and construct knowledge evolves in a developmentally predictable fashion, and have offered explanations for the difficulties some students face when asked to make their own decisions (Baxter Magolda, 1992; Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger,…

This study explores how motivational factors are associated with Taiwanese college students' cognitive, personal, and social development by incorporating both relatively global, static self-attributes, such as social-oriented achievement motivation and individual-oriented achievement motivation, which are considered to be culturally balanced…

Utilizing Bennett's genres of multicultural education, the authors examine whether diversity course content clusters influence students' civic engagement. Diversity course content clusters were predicted to influence White students and students of color differently, given principles identified by social development, cognitive development, and…

Informal (and sometimes formal) assessments in higher education often ask students how their skills or attitudes have changed as the result of engaging in a particular course or program; however, it is unclear to what extent these self-reports are accurate. Using a longitudinal sample of over 3,000 college students, we found that students were…

Development defined as increasingly complex and adaptive forms of seeing, knowing, and caring sheds light on how to identify aims of educational programs designed to foster development. Educators who aspire to promote development as well as content mastery help students understand the basis for their decisions, explore alternative bases and…

In this article, the author briefly traces the academic traditions that have formed the major body of student development literature, highlighting the evolution of separate rather than integrated constructs. She then summarizes Robert Kegan's conception of a metapsychology that integrates many of these separate lines of research. Next, she offers…

Three spiritual development theories and theorists (i.e., Parks, Fowler, and Helminiak) were compared with traditional cognitive development theory and theorists. The analysis reveals both commonalities between the two sets of theories and unique contributions to an understanding of student development on the part of spiritual development theory.…

Examined the relationship between cognitive development and the development of identity in college freshmen. During the beginning of the freshman year of college, students who scored higher in cognitive development tended to have a less developed sense of self than students who scored lower in cognitive development. (Author/LLL)

Examined whether gender differences exist within cognitive stages and whether gender differences exist at the cognitive stage level in college freshmen (n=86). Longitudinal study found students' epistemological development revealed gender differences in epistemological reasoning structures but not in cognitive structural stages. (Author/ABL)