Patterns In Reflective Thinking

By Author: Ella
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The Reflective Judgment Model (RJM) was originally informed primarily by Dewey's work on reflective thinking, Broughton's work on natural epistemology, Popper's philosophical arguments regarding probable's, and Perry's scheme of intellectual and ethical development. Kitchener and King sought to disentangle the intellectual strands from the ethical strands of development in the Perry scheme, arguing that the shift of emphasis from intellectual development in the first five positions to ethical and identity development in the last four positions suggested that two different constructs were at the heart of the model, leaving unarticulated both early positions of Fake Watches ethical development and later positions of intellectual development. To address the concern that two constructs were conflated on the same developmental continuum, we sought to articulate advanced ways of knowing that were grounded in the study of epistemology and that were not bounded by relativistic ways of knowing. Thus, this model has an explicit grounding in both philosophy and psychology. More recently, we ...
... have continued to explore this grounding by linking it to Fischer's (1980) work on skill theory (King, in press; Kitchener & Fisher, 1990; Kitchener, Lynch, Fisher, & Wood, 1993), Hofer's (2004b) work relating epistemology to met cognition, and "folk" epistemology in psychology .

The seven stages of the RJM were identified primarily from a sample of 80 high school, college, and graduate students who were interviewed up to four times over a 10-year period. The resulting model maps the development of epistemic beliefs, or beliefs about the nature and certainty of knowledge, noting the strong correspondence between one's view of knowledge (what and how one can know) and one's concepts of justification (the basis for justifying one's beliefs) and the internal logic within stages that reflects this relationship. The RJM is specifically situated in ways people reason about "ill-structured" problems, or controversial issues that Tag Heuer Replica Watches are not defined with a high degree of completeness or certainty, and about which there are reasonable disagreements about best solutions. In terms of changes in concepts of justification, the RJM traces a developmental evolution from authority-based judgments where the individual relies heavily on others when making decisions, to judgments where the role of evidence is apparent but not well understood or consistently used, to judgments that are made in light of uncertainty, but that the individual nevertheless evaluates as more or less defensible or plausible based on evidence and rules of evidence.

A distinguishing feature of research on this model is the body of studies that were systematically conducted to validate the RJM stages as a developmental sequence (King & Kitchener, 1994, 2002, 2004). This program of research examined changes in epistemic cognition over time (up to 10 years) and across educational levels and contexts, using both student and nonstudent samples, and extending across the lifespan. It also examined the relationship between reflective thinking and other developmental models. The results of over 1700 RJM interviews are compiled in King and Kitchener (1994). Of particular interest here is the pervasive finding across studies and samples that although there is clear and steady progress in learning to think reflectively in college, few college graduates evidenced the ability to make reflective judgments; most scored at the quasi-reflective stages.