Encouraging Intellectual Growth: Senior College Student Profiles

Researchers and educational writers provide many views on what characteristics and skills the college graduate should possess (P. D. Gardner, 1998). Given the rapidly changing nature of knowledge in all disciplines and the subjectivity of grading systems, we argue the best indicator of a successful college education is a student's ability to think complexly about difficult problems. In this paper we examine students' levels of intellectual development to inform our understanding of how college experiences affect students' abilities to think in complex ways about difficult problems. Using both qualitative and quantitative research techniques, we examine and compare the experiences of 19 senior college students who were rated at opposite ends of the Perry scheme of intellectual development. The 19 students were purposefully selected to represent the high and low ends of the Perry scale from an overall sample of 27 senior students at a large eastern university. Ten students from the original sample of 27 demonstrated the most advanced cognitive development with Perry scale ratings of 5–7. Nine students had Perry ratings below 4; this was the lowest rating represented in the sample. We examine the similarities and differences between these two sets of students' academic profiles, and their comments about their curricular experiences, and how the Perry scale reflects on these results. We then discuss how these similarities and differences relate to students' development of the desirable characteristics of a college graduate, implications for faculty and administrators, and the relationship of these results to prior studies using the Perry scheme.