Helping students develop higher-level thinking: use of the Perry model

This paper reports data on how well an experiential curriculum helps students mature intellectually. It also reports on-going experiments with teaching methods designed to accelerate students´ intellectual development. The data collection, curriculum design and experimental teaching approaches are based on William Perry´s model of intellectual development which describes the stages people progress through in their understanding of knowledge, the use of evidence and their ability to understand open-ended problem solving. Our data show that one quarter of CSM students do mature to an acceptable level by graduation, but fully one third are still at a troublingly low level as seniors. The current efforts of some of our faculty center on refining our teaching approaches to help more students make significant progress in their thinking. The approach is basically one of putting students into the middle of an open-ended situation and then mentoring them through their misconceptions. We use our role as authority to coax them beyond the “single right answer” mentality. Our experience in trying to implement this teaching approach is discussed