Perry Traces The Evolution In "forms" Of Thinking About The World

By Author: Joan Smith
Total Articles: 2
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Perry's scheme traces the evolution in "forms" of thinking about the world (i.e., the cognitive structures discussed above) through nine positions from which an individual construes knowledge and values. In Perry's words, "These 'forms' characterize the structures which the students explicitly or Rolex Watches implicitly impute to the world, especially those structures in which they construe the nature and origins of knowledge, of value, and of responsibility". Perry summarized the scheme as follows (using the gendered language common to that time):

In its full range the scheme begins with those simplistic forms in which a person construes his world in unqualified polar terms of absolute right-wrong, good-bad; it ends with those complex forms through which he undertakes to affirm his own commitments in a world of contingent knowledge and relative values. The intervening forms and transitions in the scheme outline the major steps through which the person, as evidenced in our students' reports, appears to extend his power to make meaning in successive confrontations with diversity. ...
... The nine positions that comprise this developmental continuum reflect an evolution of ways of thinking and of being in the world. The sequence of positions of the Perry scheme from dualistic to contingent to being able to make considered commitments conveys an order Perry called logical: "an order in which one form leads to another through differentiations and reorganizations required for the meaningful interpretation of increasingly complex experience". This illustrates the concept of sequentially described above.

The discussion of commitment in the last four positions included decisions as wide ranging as making scholarly interpretations to choosing a mate and a career. It is in these positions that the ethical threads of the scheme are most evident and here that Perry explicitly noted the role of Fake Watches identity development: "It is in one's way of affirming commitments that one finds at last the elusive sense of 'identity' one has searched for elsewhere". Although Perry offered many such connections across developmental domains, his work is typically characterized as only a model of intellectual development, and most scholarly work based on the Perry model has focused solely on the first five positions. Further, the most widely used instruments designed to measure "Perry level" Baxter Magolda's Measure of Epistemological Reflection and Moore's (1989) Learning Environment Preferences measure only intellectual development.

As a result, scholarship based on the Perry model has focused almost exclusively on the intellectual rather than the ethical elements. Scholarly reviews of research on this model are widely available; see especially Evans, Forney, Guido DiBrito (1998); Evans (in press); King (2003); Love and Guthrie (1999) and Moore (2002). These reviews consistently uphold the kinds of changes in the structure of thinking from dualistic through multiplicity to relativistic forms of thinking through the college years, but also illuminate the prevalence of the first two general categories of thinking among college students (especially traditional-age students), with little attention to the development of commitment in relativism.