Understanding of Transition

Summary

Key Words

Introduction
It may seem that a rather abstract theory of intellectual development would hardly be relevant to the construction of practical curricula. Nevertheless the Perry scheme of intellectual development resonates with our own experiences both of the ways in which we might have learned our specialist subjects in the past and also the ways in which students react to curricula. An account of it is offered here as a dimension which should be taken into consideration when developing year 1 curricula.

Relevance to the STAR guidelines

The Perry scheme
On the basis of extensive interviews with students in the 1950s and 1960’s William Perry proposed that students passed through nine developmental positions when learning a subject. A succinct description of all positions has been offered by Rapaport (1984). A position is a student viewpoint and they have been grouped in to four major categories; Dualism, Multiplicity, Contextual Relativism, and Commitment within Relativism. From a curriculum development viewpoint the last two may be treated as one. A critical feature here is that progression is required from one position to the next and that well designed curricula should take students rapidly through the early steps rather than assume them. Positions are subject specific so that just because a student has reached relativistic position in one topic it does not necessarily mean that he/she will take up a similar position towards another.

Dualism. In a dualistic position a student believes that all questions have answers that are either right or wrong. Often the rightness or wrongness of the information depends on the authority of the information provider rather than the evidence which might support or not support a particular view. This is characterized by a student attitude that demands to know the truth so that it can be learned and repeated for assessment.
In the Perry scheme Dualism is divided into two parts. The first (Basic Dualism) is probably a theoretical extension, and describes a position in which students believe that all questions have right answers and that the role of a student is to learn these right answers from their teachers.
The second stage is Dualism itself and occurs when faced with conflicting information. The student role is now to find and learn the right answer. Dualistic students prefer highly structured teaching dominated by the teacher in which they can learn the right answers.

Multiplicity. This stage is also divided into two. Early multiplicity is characterized by the student who classifies questions into two types;
· those for which the teacher knows the right answer; and
· those for which the teacher does not yet know the right answer.
All questions still have right answers. However, the student now acknowledges that some questions have not yet been answered.
The student role is still to find and learn the right answer. The teacher’s role however, is perceived to be to provide the methods for students to reveal the right answer.
As students gain experience they appreciate that many questions being discussed do not yet have definitive answers. As students enter this position of late multiplicity, teachers lose some authority and the student’s role becomes one of, not only learning those answers that are known to be right, but also offering answers themselves to those which have no answers. Single questions may have many answers, each of which might be equally valid. Teachers are seen as helping students to think about problems.

Relativism. Relativism is subdivided. In the first position, Contextual Relativism, students understand that they are not necessarily being asked to learn the right answers but to address those solutions to problems for which there is evidence. A later position is Commitment within relativism, in which students increasingly make their own decisions.
Science subjects are essentially factual even though those facts are initially dependent on an accumulation of evidence. The value of opinion, other than in giving varying weights to different pieces of evidence, is sometimes limited. Nevertheless the changes in students’ positions described in this structure are relevant to evidence based subjects until at least the stages of late multiplicity and all stages are applicable to ethical aspects of these subjects.

Exemplars
Some hypothetical examples may serve to clarify these considerations.

Developing ideas
The relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism has elements of evidence-based fact, of opinion and belief and of ethics.
Students beginning to study this topic would be expected to seek the truth, most likely from the teacher. This would be a dualist position. When it became apparent that there were at least two opposing theories relating the MMR to the development of autism, students would be expected to collect the evidence in an attempt to determine which of these two represented the truth, activities which involve an element of multiplicity. It would be likely that, given the strength of opinion involved and the involvement of non-specialists as proponents, that students would conclude that their own opinion was just as valid as anybody else’s and thereby demonstrate characteristics of late multiplicity.
In summary, the Perry sequence of positions is descriptive of a process through which students pass as they learn a topic. First they seek for the facts, then in seeking evidence for that fact they discover that not all things are known. This leads to a realization that a fact is merely one of a range of interpretations of the evidence and that their interpretation might be just as good as that of anybody else. Finally, in factual subjects, the different interpretations are given values that depend on their origin, the weight of evidence etc.

Differentiated assessment
It is worthy of note that students at one position in a subject may not understand questions directed at the assessment of another, higher, position or may consider assessment directed at a lower stage to be facile.
Rapaport (1984) further illustrates this with an example of an assessment exercise that is differentiated by Perry stage. We can translate this into a biological example.

Summarize the factors that contribute to a programme of vaccination preventing the spread of a disease and one of the following:

a) Describe the advantages of using the MMR vaccine
b) your reply to the following statement. “MMR should not be used because there is evidence that it causes disorders such as IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) and autism.”
c) From the viewpoint of a parent, outline your attitude to having your child vaccinated with MMR.

Alternative a) requires a relatively simple recall of the factual basis of the subject which favours a dualist approach. Alternative b) encourages a consideration of the evidence of a relationship between MMR and various disorders and should favour a multiplicity approach. Alternative c) invites the student to adopt the viewpoint of another and weigh the public health advantages against the parental fears of individual disadvantage. This would require a relativistic approach.

A Student Dialogue
Richard Felder at North Carolina State University has developed a useful didactic tool of simulated dialogue between students to illustrate a variety approaches to learning. An adaptation of Felder (1997) is included as Appendix 1 to illustrate three students in different Perry positions.

Conclusion.
From the standpoint of the management of transitions, the Perry scheme offers insight into a process that is often ignored by lecturing staff and curriculum developers. That is, not only does the subject develop and build its concepts from the simple to the complex but also the students themselves develop within each subject in their ability to engage with different approaches to the manipulation of information. This should affect they ways in which we teach and assess our subjects.

References
Rapaport, W. J. (1984). Critical Thinking and Cognitive Development Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 57: 610-615.
Felder, R.M. (1997) Meet Your Students 7. Dave, Martha, and Roberto . Chemical Engineering Education, 31(2), 106-107 http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/Perry.html accessed 15-11-05.

Appendix 1

Meet your Students.

Adapted (with permission) from Felder 1997.

Three BioSciences classmates are heading for lunch after a lecture on insect excretion. Mary and Bob are discussing the subject and Dave is listening silently and looking grim.
Mary: "OK, so insects are different. But just asking us to design an excretory system which would operate in the absence of a significant blood pressure. What was that about? Why can’t he just give us the facts?”

Bob: "Sure he could but all the systems we have looked at so far depend on blood pressure to produce an ultrafiltrate of the blood. And then you get to work on that. These “what if” questions are really quite stimulating.

M: "Maybe, but it's just a matter of conjecture in questions like that. Remember when he asked us to design an animal to live on Mars? Biology is a body of evidence that we can interpret to find the facts. These creative games he plays have no place in a classroom.”

B: "Come on, Mary--most real problems don't have just one solution, and he's trying to..."

M: "Yeah, yeah--he's just trying to get us to think and I'm okay with that game as long as I don't lose marks if my solution isn't the same as his. What do you think, Dave?

Dave: "I think that these problems are pointless! I just want the facts.

M: "It's not that kind of question--not everything is the same”

D: "OK, so when did he tell us the answer? I memorized every lousy word he said after I failed that last test and not one had anything to do with..."

B: "It's a thinking question--you have to try to come up with as many..."

D: "That's bull, man! I already know how to think--I'm here to learn some biology."

M: "Dave, not everything in the world is black and white--some things are fuzzy."

D: "Yeah, in those woolly humanities courses and things like astronomy where you cannot do proper experiments but not in biology-our questions have answers, and Cookie’s job is to teach them to me, not to play guessing games or put us in those dumb groups and ask us to..."

M: "Yeah, I'm not too crazy about those groups either, but..."

D: "…and that's not all—on Monday, Jim asked him that question about the best sort of gas exchange system and he starts out by saying 'it depends'...I'm paying fees for the answers, and if this bozo doesn't know them he shouldn't be up there."

M: It is obvious that mammals are better than insects. Their size, intelligence, everything shows that. Lungs are clearly better than these air line thingys.

B: "Look, the teachers don't know everything...you have to get information wherever you can--like in those groups you two were trashing: we can learn from each other--and then evaluate it and decide for ourselves, and then you can..."

D: "That's a load of..."

M: "Um, what happened in the prac trying to measure the power exerted by locust leg muscles? I used the formula for the trajectory and worked out the initial force exerted by the leg muscle as……

B: " I did the same thing at first. I reckon that is far too low. I thought about it some more and I remembered those trajectory equations only hold in a vacuum. My locust kept tumbling around after it jumped and air resistance must have reduced the length of the jump. I reckon a better way of doing it would be to video the jump and then we could get a direct measure of the initial velocity without having to worry about estimating the height and length of the jump. I wonder if I could sneak in during next week’s class and try out a few things. "

M: "Whoa-he never said anything like that in class."

These three students illustrate three levels of the Perry Model of Intellectual Development. The Perry model is a hierarchy of nine levels grouped into four categories of which the first three are of relevance here:

Dualism (Levels 1 and 2). Knowledge is black and white, every problem has one and only one correct solution, the authority (in this case, the teacher) has all the solutions, and the job of the student is to memorize and repeat them. Dualists want facts and formulas and don't like theories or abstract models, open-ended questions, or active or cooperative learning ("I'm paying tuition fees for him to teach me, not to teach myself.") At Level 2, students begin to see that some questions may seem to have multiple answers but they still believe that one of them must be right. Like many first year University students, Dave is at Level 2. He has a good grasp of the facts but cannot cope with hypothetical or unanswerable questions.

Multiplicity (Levels 3 and 4). Some questions may not have answers now but the answers will eventually be known (Level 3) or responses to some (or most) questions may always remain matters of opinion (Level 4). Open-ended questions and cooperative learning are tolerated, but not if they have too much of an effect on marks. Students start using supporting evidence to resolve issues rather than relying completely on what authorities say, but they count preconceptions and prejudices as acceptable evidence and once they have reached a solution they have little inclination to examine alternatives. Some first year students are at Level 3 in their specialist subjects, and most graduates are at Level 3 or 4. Mary is at Level 4. She considers evidence to be important but shows little sign of being able to make value judgements between different sources.

Relativism (Levels 5 and 6). Students in relativism see that knowledge and values depend on context and individual perspective rather than being externally and objectively based, as level 1-4 students believe them to be. Using real evidence to reach and support conclusions becomes habitual and not just something teachers want them to do. At Level 6, they begin to see the need for commitment to a course of action even in the absence of certainty, basing the commitment on critical evaluation rather than on external authority. A few graduates like Bob attain Level 5. He enjoys thinking critically about his work even to the extent that he questions the teacher’s approach and methodology.

The key to helping students move up this developmental scale is to provide an appropriate balance of challenge and support, occasionally posing problems one or two levels above the students' current position. If teaching is confined to single-answer problems, students will never be impelled to move beyond dualist thinking; on the other hand, expecting most first year students to think critically when solving problems and to appreciate multiple viewpoints is a sure recipe for frustration. Lecturers should assign open-ended real-world problems throughout the curriculum but should not make assessments heavily dependent on the outcomes, especially in the first two years. They should have students work in small groups (automatically exposing them to multiplicity), model the type of thinking being sought, and provide supportive feedback on the students' initial attempts to achieve it. While doing these things won't guarantee that all of our students will reach Level 5 or higher by the time they graduate, the more we move them in that direction the better we will be doing our job.

Acknowledgments
This account is based on an article by Richard Felder

Felder, R.M. (1997) Meet Your Students 7. Dave, Martha, and Roberto . Chemical Engineering Education, 31(2), 106-107 http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/Perry.html accessed 15-11-05. It has been adapted to suit a British context and moved from a focus on engineering to one on aspects of biology.