Why do teachers underestimate student's intellectual abilities?

Knowing how students conceive of knowledge and of the role of teacher and student in learning can be a helpful starting point for designing instruction. Below we consider the stages of intellectual development and their implications for teaching.

Stages of intellectual development

There are a number of models to describe students’ intellectual development in college (Perry,1968; Belenky et al,1986, Baxter-Magolda,1992). Although they have slightly different emphases, all the models describe a similar progression, described here with vocabulary borrowed from Perry.

Dualism: In early stages of intellectual development, students tend to see the world in terms of good-bad, right-wrong, black-white distinctions. Knowledge, to their mind, is unambiguous and clear, and learning a simple matter of information-exchange. Students at this stage believe the teacher’s job is to impart facts and their job is to remember and reproduce them. At this early stage of intellectual development, students may be frustrated when the teacher provides conditional answers (e.g., “It depends on the context”) or introduces more questions rather than giving “the right answer”.

Multiplicity: The next stage of intellectual development begins when students realize that experts can disagree and facts can contradict one another. To students at this stage of development, everything becomes a matter of perspective and opinion, with all opinions accorded equal validity. They feel more empowered to think for themselves and question received wisdom, but they are not necessarily able to evaluate different perspectives or marshal evidence to support their own. They may also view instructor evaluations of their work as purely subjective.

Relativism: At a more sophisticated stage of development, students begin to recognize the need to support their opinions with evidence. They accept that reasonable people can disagree, but understand that some perspectives have more validity than others and that even the word of authorities should be analyzed critically, not swallowed whole. Like students at the dualistic stage they may have strong views, but these views are grounded in examination and reflection. They begin to perceive the role of the teacher differently: as a knowledgeable guide or conversation partner, not an infallible authority but also not “just another opinion”.

Commitment: The last stage in Perry’s model does not involve a jump in intellectual sophistication so much as the application of knowledge gained in the relativism stage. Here, students make choices and decisions in the outside world that are informed by relativistic knowledge.

It is important to note that students do not necessarily move through each of these stages in lock-step. Some students might take longer to move out of dualism than others; some might get comfortable at the multiplicity stage and never reach relativism. By the same token, students do not necessarily move through the stages sequentially: when students encounter new intellectual challenges (for example, material that fundamentally shakes their beliefs or assumptions) they may “retreat” to earlier stages temporarily. Baxter-Magolda’s work is sobering in that it suggests that (a) students enter college at a far lower stage of intellectual sophistication than we often believe, and (b) they generally do not progress as far as we might hope.  The graph below, based on national data, illustrates where most students are intellectually during the four (or five) years of college. Apparently, while multiplistic thinking increases in college and dualistic thinking decreases, relativistic thinking does not develop to a very significant degree.