The influence of a classic.

WILLIAM PERRY WROTE, "A fundamental belief in students is more important than anything else. This fundamental belief is not a sentimental matter: it is a very demanding matter of realistically conceiving the student where he or she is, and at the same time never losing sight of where he or she can be."

The first significant contribution was Perry's use of the concept of positions. His sense of the positionality of students as they approached learning certainly anticipated the rise of standpoint theory that began a decade and a half after the book was first published. This emphasis on standpoint--the perspectives acquired from one's lived life--has been a major foundation of much of the social identity theory of the past two decades. Our ability to take into account the influences of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class as well as other aspects of identity has been greatly influenced by the concept of positionality, literally one's stance with respect to knowing, making meaning, and making commitments. Perry stressed the student's ability to construct meaning and to shift or change those constructions or standpoints to developmentally accommodate uncertainty, paradox, and the demands of greater complexity in knowledge and learning. He even suggested that students could be in several different positions at the same time with respect to different subjects or experiences. Thus he created a developmental model that both conformed to traditional hierarchical notions and, at the same time, broke free of them. Just as he always saw the student as more complex than any theory, he heard in their thinking more complexity than any benchmark along the way of his model.

Perry's understanding of positionality was deeply related to his understanding of developmental transitions. Again, he anticipated later models of adult transition when he strongly emphasized our need to understand students in motion and to not imprison them in stages. He once wrote, "Perhaps development is all transition, and 'stages' are only resting points along the way" (Henderson, 1998). This notion of students-in-transition required that those of us who work with them think about what would be optimal conditions of growth. The very process of thinking about the complexities of students living in the in-between demands that we consider the specific conditions of challenge and support that will encourage their growth. Bill [Perry] knew that as students' thinking changed, so did their selfconcept, their roles, their ways of interpreting the world around them. For this reason, he wanted us to keep the dynamic view of students at the center of our thinking and to always link the needs of students to our notions of pedagogy.

His recognition of the students' courage brought with it the reciprocal demand that we encourage them. He was adamantly against any notion of trying to force growth or development (the notion of force being an antidevelopmental concept). Students were not potted plants to be watered in some academic hothouse, nor were they to be subjects of academic experiments. They were simply to be seen as courageous human beings who needed company and understanding along the way. He often said that faculty make the mistake of thinking that they have only two options when grading papers or working with students: praise and blame. But Bill constantly reminded us that there is a third, more powerful and necessary option: recognition. For when the student is recognized, the conditions of respect and encouragement that make risk possible and the pain of growth endurable are present....

That ability to be awed, to hear with new and wondrous ears, enabled Perry to emphasize the uniqueness of each student's voice ... So many of the theorists who were influenced both by Perry the person and by his model have clearly acknowledged that among the many influences, the uniqueness of the student voice was central.

In the thirty years since the publication of the first study report of Perry's research (the book was published two years later), there have been significant elaborations on the original model. As more and more data were collected on an ever-diverse student population, we were able to expand and deepen our understanding of the various positions and transitions involved in the developmental scheme. While the model remains essentially the same in structure and scope, we simply know more about the characteristics of both the model and the students whose words inform the model. Prior to reading Perry's work in its original form, it is important to keep in mind several significant elaborations of our knowledge that have come from extensive data collection over the past three decades.

The issue that often arises is the issue of the original sample of students from which the model was shaped. The Harvard and Radcliffe students of the late 50s and early 60s are not generalizable to "the American college student" population for many reasons (many more men than women in the sample, socioeconomic class, the sociological characteristics of the era, likely educational background, age, and certainly race and ethnicity). However, it must be remembered that the assessment procedures that have been developed (especially by Knefelkamp and Widick, and by Moore) have facilitated the measurement of tens of thousands of students at all types of American colleges and universities. Careful records have been kept that indicate that the model is useful with a wide range of diverse students. Its efficacy remains strong, and there continue to be studies that extend the range of students for whom the general characteristics of intellectual development are accurate and valid. After careful consideration, this should come as no surprise to those of us who work in higher education. We are well aware of the socializing effects of school systems, and that many (perhaps even most) students are educated in environments that Freire would characterize as "banking models," with their emphasis on authority, information exchange, and the quest for answers.

There are at least three distinct but related uses of [Perry's developmental model] as metaphor: 1) "General Perry"--that general overview of an individual's intellectual development that is derived from the analysis of several interviews about the topics of ways of knowing and the nature of knowledge and education; 2) "Contextual Perry"--the particular way of thinking associated with a particular context such as an academic discipline, a religious belief system, or a specific course (students can vary in position in different courses in the same academic term); and 3) "Functional Regression"--the phenomenon seen when adult learners undertake new learning in a new learning environment and "functionally" regress to multiplistic thinking until they feel comfortable in the environment (we first observed this with graduate students).

An additional issue with respect to assessment is the question of how cultural perspectives and values affect the student data and the rating or evaluation methods. This is, of course, an increasingly important issue in American society as well as in our colleges and universities. The original model is Western in nature; it reflects the perspective that a more mature student moves through levels of thinking complexity and is able to develop "independence" of thought and judgment. The model was developed during a period before the new scholarship of gender, race, and class questioned the assumptions of "independence" as a maturity characteristic. Serious questions, then, arise--about gender, about various domestic diversity cultures within the United States, and about international students. We have been carefully studying what are now called "culture cues" that are present in the data. (For example, first-generation Asian American students often indicate a complexity of thought consistent with contextual relativism and at the same time use phrases of respect and adherence to learned authorities that have been associated with more dualistic or early multiplistic forms of thinking. In this case, such students are not dualistic, but are reflecting appropriate cultural perspectives.)

This work is particularly important as it allows us to monitor the efficacy of the model and determine its limits. Neither Perry nor anyone deeply associated with the model assumed universality of its characteristics or its applications. And certainly no one assumed that the model would be the only one to assess student needs. In addition to the combination of intellectual development with learning styles, a very powerful combination is of the Perry model with the theoretical work reflected in Women's Ways of Knowing (WWK). One can argue persuasively that there are significant parallels of insight that come from overlaying the two models. Both models trace students' increased abilities to become active generators of learning and to learn with and from their peers. Both stress the constructed and contested nature of knowledge, and both, using very different language, describe the students' move from silence into agency and voice. I have found, for example, that the WWK concept of subjective knowing allows my own students to have a deeper understanding of the characteristics of early multiplicity and to have a greater appreciation for one of the major characteristics of that position: namely the realization that one can and should bring one's own experiences to bear on the interpretation of knowledge and not just be expected to "apply" what one learns in the classroom to other aspects of one's life. This notion of reciprocity is first experienced as subjective, and then develops into an expectation of what the community of scholars should be about.

One of the most important lessons of working with the model has to do with terminology. There has been considerable confusion with respect to ... later multiplicity and relativism. People have confused the "do your own thing" aspect of late multiplicity with relativism. This criticism comes particularly from those who feel that the academy has lost its standards and academic values. Perry was particularly vexed over this misunderstanding. "Relativism," he would say, "means relative to what--to something--it implies comparison, criteria, and judgment!"

Two additional models that owe a great deal to Perry's work are King and Kitchener's model of reflective judgment (additional and acknowledged influences are Popper; Harvey, Hunt, and Schroder; Loevinger; and Dewey) and Baxter-Magolda's epistemological reflection model (additional influences are the authors of Women's Ways of Knowing and William Moore). Each of these models will reveal strong similarities in these cognitive-constructivist models, it will also reveal a mutual influence in the "naming" of the different development positions or stages.

A new book, Student Development in College (Evans, Forney, and Guido-DiBrito 1998), offers an excellent, though brief, analysis of the Perry influence on what the authors call "later cognitive-structural theories."

During the year 1974-75, Widick and Knefelkamp began the task of translating Perry's model into one that was usable for the classroom and in other educational settings. Our goal was to understand the underlying characteristics of the student-as-learner so that we could design instructional environments that were characterized by a balance of intellectual challenges and supports. We wanted to facilitate student learning and intellectual development. Another goal was to develop and vary instructional variables so that we would, in Bill's words, "find ways to encourage" our students. We also believed that students who became more complex in their thinking in the classroom could apply that thinking to the complexities of citizenship in American life. (Bill was often asked if development was better, to which he replied that he thought it was a more adequate way of coping with a complex world.)

We identified four variables that seemed to underlie the developmental model: 1) the student's experience of and response to diversity; 2) the amount of authority-provided structure for the learning environment; 3) the nature of experiential learning that was experienced as part of the class; and 4) the degree to which the class could be characterized as respectful, collaborative, and able to relate the subject matter to the context of the students' lives (personalism). Each of the variables exists on a continuum that represents greater or lesser presence of the variable in the pedagogical design. Students who are in earlier positions of the Perry model are in need of greater amounts of structure and experiential learning as they move into the uncertainty of knowledge and learning. Students who are in the later positions along the model often value experiential learning, but do not need as much instructor-guided structure in order to work with the concepts of the class.

Research with the developmental instruction model has been widespread for the past twenty-five years in a wide range of academic and professional school disciplines.

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EDITORIAL NOTE:

In the mid-1970s, Carol Widlick and Lee Knefelkamp translated William Perry's model for intellectual and ethical development into one that was usable for the college classroom and in other educational settings. They developed the Measure of Intellectual Development (MID), a method that requires students to respond to a series of essays concerning their perspectives on learning, decision making, and academic subjects. The instrument and rating system they developed is still widely used. William Moore and Kathe Taylor at the Center for Developmental Instruction coordinate most of the continuing work with the MID. For a workbook on this methodology, see Marcia Mentkowski, et al., 1983. Using the Perry Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development as a College Outcomes Measure: A Process and Criteria for Judging Student Performance. Milwaukee: Alverno College.

WORKS CITED

Baxter-Magolda, M.B. 1992. Knowing and reasoning in college: Gender-related patterns in students' intellectual development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Belenky, M.F., B.M. Clinchy, N.R. Goldberger, and J.M. Tarule. 1986. Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice, and mind. New York: Basic Books.

Evans, J.E., D.S. Forney, and F. Guido-DiBrito. 1998. Student development in college. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Henderson, A. 1998. Perry-isms. Personal Manuscript.

King, P.M. and K.S. Kitchener. 1994. Developing reflective judgment: Understanding and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Knefelkamp, L.L., C. Widick, and C.A. Parker. 1978. Applying new developmental findings. New Directions for Student Services, no. 4. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Perry, W.G., Jr. 1970. Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Perry, W.G., Jr. 1978. Sharing in the costs of growth. In C.A. Parker, ed. Encouraging development in college students. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 267-273.

Perry, W.C., Jr. 1981. Cognitive and ethical growth: The Making of meaning. In A.W. Chickering and Associates. The modern American college: Responding to the new realities of diverse students and a changing society. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 76-116.