This study of high school students argues that American high school classes continue to be unsuccessful and boring to students because they artificially separate intellectual achievement and social development of adolescents. To understand how students view their high school priorities and the role of their experiences in the transition from…

Perry's theory of intellectual and ethical development of college students is briefly reviewed. This theory was based on work with Harvard University students, and addresses dualism, multiplicity, and relativism. In the first stage, a student sees the world in right-wrong, black-white terms, with no room in the thinking process for conditional or…

Seldom are college students introduced to theories that describe how they and other students change intellectually during their college years. Two epistemological perspectives on cognitive development in college students and how they can be presented to students are examined in this paper. The first perspective is William Perry's forms of…

The complex theory of knowledge and cognitive interests by the sociologist Jurgen Habermas, the dominant critical theorist in present day Germany, is applicable to current composition pedagogy. According to Habermas, all knowledge is shaped and used in three ways: in technical ways for instrumental reasons; in practical ways for socio-cultural…

This case study contributes to the debate about professional education and the nature of complex interpersonal skills. Preservice training programs make certain assumptions about how students acquire practical knowledge and consequently about how such knowledge is best taught. Students form their own beliefs, which in turn exercise considerable…

A study assessed the relationship between the freshman-year experience and the importance students attach to the educational goals of gaining a liberal education, developing career knowledge and skills, enhancing personal knowledge and improving interpersonal skills. (Author/MLW)

William Perry argued that adult development can be marked by a progressively refined set of questions focused on how Authorities like teachers can support multiple right answers and still maintain that there are wrong answers. When prospective English teachers view right and wrong answers as relativistic, they seem to view themselves as…

During the decade of the 1980s, rapid changes in the nature of medical practice and in patterns of health care delivery confronted medical educators with many challenges. At the Medical College of Wisconsin these challenges led to the design and implementation of the 2-year longitudinal experience called the Profession of Medicine Program (POMP)…

A survey of college sophomores (N=671) at Georgetown University (District of Columbia) was conducted to measure the extent of their participation in intellectual pursuits and other complementary or competing activities. Principal components analysis was used to identify questions which measured underlying tendencies, and weighted indexes were…

The intellectual development of black college students on a predominantly white campus was examined using the Reflective Judgment model of post-adolescent intellectual development. The model posits a seven-stage sequence of changes in assumptions about the sources of certainty of knowledge, and shows how these assumptions affect the ways adults…

A study investigated the attitudes of teachers in graduate-level inservice education concerning multicultural education. Subjects were 55 students aged 20-55 in a graduate-level multicultural education class. Three surveys with open-ended questions elicited information about personal educational background (including gender factors influencing…

The purpose of this media study sought to determine whether similar patterns are found (1) when interviewing a larger number of participants and (2) when focusing on a specific content area. Thirty-eight undergraduate students enrolled in an undergraduate computer education class in a large Midwestern university volunteered to participate in…

Academic departments exert a powerful influence on students by recruitment of distinctive personality types into academic disciplines, and by a socialization process in which departments reward students for the display of attitudes in accordance with the norms of their disciplines. This study examined the differential patterns of student growth…

The socialization of sociology graduate students is examined to determine why graduate students often lack professional confidence, promise, and maturity. A review of professional development literature indicates possible problems. The student who lacks professional and occupational objectives, commitment, and works at less than full potential is…

This 2-year study looked at the effects of incorporating reflective journals within a workshop approach into graduate and undergraduate education courses. The workshop approach involves four key components: (1) reflective journals, (2) individual student-professor conferences, (3) structured small group discussions of project progress with peers,…