Perry's Scheme of Intellectual Development ERIC LANDRUM: Greetings, I'm Eric Landrum from the Department of Psychology. This is a brief little mini-lecture prepared in Camtasia, using PowerPoint as well, on Perry's Scheme of Intellectual Development. And this is for the folks enrolled in the Course Design Institute for the Center for Teaching and Learning, Summer 2012. So let's go ahead and get started. Perry's Theory is a stage or positions theory. It was based kind of on a continuation and extension of the work by Jean Piaget. Perry's Theory claims that college students and others journey through nine different positions of intellectual development. And this little mini-lecture will be really focusing on those earlier stages of Perry's Theory. So the first of the four stages that we'll cover in any little detail right now is dualism. And the dualistic approach says the following, that students tend to look at the world as a place for absolutes, such as right or wrong, true or false, really with no gray area. There are answers out there to be memorized and regurgitated. A right answer exists for everything. And it's presumed to be known by the instructor. And so knowledge and knowledge acquisition is acquired through hard work and obedience and, typically, perhaps on a multiple choice type of exam where the professor lectures, and the students memorize and regurgitate and are the recipients of knowledge from the instructor and will try to parrot that information back. The second stage of Perry's theme or stages of development, of cognitive development, is multiplicity. And the multiplicity perspective suggests that there are multiple perspectives to a problem. And students tend to look at this as, there's no one correct answer. Each perspective is inadequate. That could be because either the qualified authorities don't have the answer yet or they're unwilling to give us the answer. The other piece of this, though, is that there tends to be a little recognition of some types of evidence is better than others. In other words, well, that's just my opinion. And my opinion is as good as your opinion because, of course, there's no answer. And so in the multiplicative stage for Perry's Cognitive Development Theory, there are multiple perspectives. There's really no right or wrong answer. My answer is just as good as yours. You see the example there I show you at the bottom of the slide. We're all entitled to our opinion. So we get out of dualism into multiplicity. The next stage is relativism. And these are really thought of as rungs on the ladder. And so now we're getting to a higher developmental rung, so to speak. And so diversity and uncertainty are legitimate but temporary because the authorities haven't figured it out yet. And once they do, they'll tell us. And then we'll know what to believe. However, at this stage, though, not all alternatives are valued equally. People can disagree without believing all the views are equally valid. And so you might see students at this level enjoying playing the devil's advocate. And so you might see this kind of reasoning, this little critical thinking element develop within the relativistic stage of Perry's Stage Theory. And finally, the fourth and last one that I'll talk about in this quick little mini-lecture is commitment. And sometimes you'll see this in literature called relativism in context. And so now at this level of development, for Perry, uncertainty is seen to be legitimate and extensive. Students really do understand that there are multiple perspectives. Not only do they have to make a commitment to one perspective themselves, but also they have to acknowledge possible alternative viewpoints. When you really start to see this is that when students can internalize these commitments and actually start to make actions based on their own commitments, such as career choices, or choices about political affiliations, or even relationship choices in their lives. And so you start to see that there are other perspectives. They're not, perhaps, all equally valuable, although they should perhaps be considered at least. And uncertainty is legitimate and extensive. And students get that. Students no longer go to the professor for the absolute answer, knowing that he or she may not know the absolute answer. Just one little final slide to kind of give you a brief overview of all nine stages, if you were to delve into Perry's Stage Theory more thoroughly. And so we've really only covered so much really about the first four here between "there is no gray area" at Stage 1 to Stage 9 "critical thinking is an ongoing process." And so you can see there is a developmental sequence and flow here. And certainly, students will go back and forth. Once you get to Stage 8, it's not that you don't ever go back to Stage 1. It's certainly recursive and iterative. And actually it's simultaneous. And so in a class in my major, I might be at a Stage 6. But in a class for intro to whatever at the Psych 101 level or at any kind of the foundational studies level, it might be memorize, regurgitate, Stage 1 dualism approach. Anyway, that's it for me, a very brief little introduction into Perry's Stages of Intellectual Development.