This website is dedicated to the slow accumulation and gradual interpretation of knowledge through the play of research.
This website is dedicated to the slow accumulation and gradual interpretation of knowledge through the play of research.
I found this article via the ProQuest Research Library database.
Jackson, head librarian for the Social Sciences and Humanities at Iowa State, begins by reflecting on the common complaints of librarians about students who seem unwilling or incapable of doing effective critical research on their own.
She suggests that theories of cognitive development may help librarians understand the difficulty of teaching information literacy.
Jackson points helpfully to existing research on the problem of the stages of development in young people's cognition.
I find especially interesting her discussion of William G. Perry, whose work she summarizes on her page 29. Perry provides a compelling description of the stages through which college students pass in their intellectual and ethical development, although one might question its general applicability, since it is based only on qualitative research with Harvard and Radcliffe students, research which began in the 1960's. Jackson then points to other research which supposedly backs up Perry's general conclusions (29-30).
If Jackson is right, then intellectual maturity is measured or characterized by a person's willingness to admit that what we call "knowledge" is actually a product that is always constructed, contingent, limited, and subject to revision. In other words, intellectual development is development towards a perspective which looks quite post modern in its epistemology. This mature position Jackson shorthands as "relativistic," while the immature position she names "dualistic" (following Perry; for details on the stages in between, see Perry or her discussion of Perry).
Research suggests that, in actual practice, most undergraduates progress only about half-way through the scales of intellectual and ethical maturity. Virtually no undergraduates develop higher order skills of interpretation and argument (30). They leave college capable only of realizing that differences of opinion and argument exist.
The common frustrations of teachers (and the librarians who try to help their students) are related to the fact that "most assignments teachers design are aimed at the relativistic positions, positions that most undergraduates never reach" (30).
Jackson's article then turns to the ways that published standards of information literacy and commonly accepted "outcomes" for library science, etc., are actually not well suited to the realities of the cognitive development of undergraduates.
Perhaps no one will find these results shocking. It turns out that students tend to treat all sources equally, as unquestionable authorities, and that they usually will try to use, without criticism, the first couple of sources they locate on any search of a database (like Google or the library catalog), and regard that as the end, rather than the beginning, of the process.
Jackson argues that these cognitive development theories and should be taken into account in the design of assignments. Reporting on the conclusions of several other scholars' arguments, she emphasizes the role of what I would call student centered teaching. We start where the students are, and we teach to that. Young students only recognize capital-A Authorities; they may not see librarians as authorities; they probably over-emphasize the idea of the "right" answer; they aren't prepared to see that their own work of analysis and synthesis is a process of creating new knowledge; they tend to view their job as that of the reporter rather than the critic.
We need to take that into account when we try to get students to develop intellectually, providing an emotionally supportive environment that helps them manage the "risk" involved in real learning.
Furthermore if we remember that these levels of intellectual attainment exist, then, perhaps, we can design assignments which force students to examine (implicitly or explicitly) their actual tendencies and assumptions, helping them to move from one stage to another: "it might be useful to think about which outcomes fit which positions" (32).
If we were to follow this advice, for most of us it would probably result in our adoption of a more limited scope for our intended outcomes when working with undergraduates, but there is promise of twofold reward: less frustration for educators and more development for young learners.