Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years: A Scheme

By William G. Perry Jr.

Book Overview

Since its original publication in 1970, this landmark book byWilliam Perry has remained the cornerstone of much of the studentdevelopment research that followed. Using research conducted withHarvard undergraduates over a fifteen-year period, Perry derived anAnduring framework for characterizing student development--a schemeso accurate that it still informs and advances investigations intostudent development across gAnders and cultures. Drawing from firsthand accounts, Perry traces a path from students'adolescence into adulthood. His nine-stage model describes thesteps that move students from a simplistic, categorical view ofknowledge to a more complex, contextual view of the world and ofthemselves. Throughout this journey of cognitive development, Perryreveals that the most significant changes occur in forms in whichpeople perceive their world rather than in the particulars of theirattitudes and concerns. He shows ultimately that the nature ofintellectual development is such that we should pay as muchattention to the processes we use as to the content. In a new introduction to this classic work, Lee Knefelkamp--a closecolleague of Perry's and a leading expert on college studentdevelopment--evaluates the book's place in the literature of highereducation. Knefelkamp explains how the Perry scheme has shapedcurrent thinking about student development and discusses the mostsignificant research that has since evolved from Perry'sgroundbreaking effort. Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Yearsis a work that every current and future student servicesprofessional must have in their library.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0787941182
• ISBN13: 9780787941185
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Putting the Perry Scheme in historical perspective

If you already know the secondary literature on the Perry scheme, you know his model of undergraduate intellectual and moral development. Students move through Positions -- NOT "stages" -- as they mature, from a rigid dualistic view of knowledge ("right" vs. "wrong") through various forms of multiplicity -- there is no certainty & so all opinions have the same truth status -- until they reach relativism, in which Position they recognize that all knowledge is contextual. Moving beyond relativism, some become commited relativists, learning to live with competing & contradictory commitments. This is NOT a simple deterministic developmental scheme, as some students retreat from relativism, others deny or reject the implications of their positions, and the time spent in any one position is indeterminate.What current users of the Perry scheme may not realize is how meticulous he was in constructing it. This book charts the origins of the project from his counseling of students at Harvard & Radcliffe in the early 1950s, through his creation of the Checklist of Educational Values in the mid-50s, to the semi-structured personal interviews with 109 students from the classes of '62 and '63. Although he never lost sight of his ultimate goal -- developing a tool to help people who counseled college students on their journey toward greater self-understanding -- he invested heavily in methodological innovations, creating valid and reliable measures toward that end. Working with a team of graduate assistants, he created interview & coding protocols that are a model of careful scholarly work.Two other points about the book's value today: First, it contains extensive quotations from the actual recorded transcripts of the interviews, thus allowing us to see for ourselves the correspondence between the model's Position descriptions and the students' own words. Second, Perry's scheme was built on a very strong normative position. He firmly believed that intellectual and moral growth are desirable outcomes of a student's college years. He wrote of the courage students needed to assume the risks of forward movement toward higher Positions in his scheme.In the last paragraphs, Perry called for a new model of education that would support students in their risk taking, and his call is just as relevant today as it was 30 years ago.

Superb! A pleasure to see republished.

An excellent read for those interested in the literature of education and student development. The introduction, written by L. Lee Kenefelkamp, not only pays homage to Perry's work, but also places it's relevence in modern educational philosophies. A must have for anyone involved in education!