Reflection on Perry’s Model

Perry’s model divides intellectual development into nine positions. With the development, the authority plays less and less important roles in students’ thoughts. Culver mentioned that most students appear to leave college in Position 3 or 4, because at this point, students admit a lot of alternative views but do not take a stand or commitment towards any of these ones. Some students also quit at later positions because they do not have the strong will to take the commitments. From Culver’s view, students’ willing to commit is a very important factor that dominates students’ retention. This makes me to think about what is related to willingness to commit or what “commitment” means. From my own experience, I would like to commit because the benefit covers the effort in the long run. I think this also applied to the students. If a student thinks continuing can bring more benefit, he or she probably will stay. But the decision and situation varies for different students. For example, getting a degree may help a student to find a better job. However, a report mentioned that fewer students stay in engineering because they find engineering hard and requiring more effort than other disciplines. So their decisions are much dependent on how they balance a better job and the effort they will spend during degree pursuing.

I like Perry’s model very much. It describes the changes happen in students mind so that we can analyze the key factors behind students’ quit. We can also think about what should we do at certain positions to prevent their quit. My research topic also involves analyzing factors that affect the retention of engineering students. Perry’s model is a good reference for me.

On a couple of week 4 readings

There is a continuous tone of concern against how classification and categorization is used which I found a little difficult to connect with while reading Bowker and Star. However as they say "To Classify is Human." The very basic manifestation of this is language in which we use words to label things and concept. There is no language in my knowledge which does not have adjectives. I find it interesting that to describe something we compare it with something else. Similalry when we want to compare something with other things we tend to use superlatives for the object that we want to talk about. This I guess is what politics is about. To express your opinion and find support for it. I think there is a politician is all of us and most of what we do is political. It is only that some of us have a greater conviction for our views and have a greater interest and capacity to exert ourselves than others.

While reading Culver and Hackos who have discussed Perry's model in the context of engineering education, what caught my attention is the year it was published, 1982. The paper has clear description of what engineering education is like and how it should be. It took something like 20 or so years that we now have ABET's Engineering Criteria 2000 which require similar kind of attributes in the engineering graduates that Culver and Hackos are asking for. Similarly we now have "Engineer of 2020" program which calls for changes in engineering practice and education. It took us 20 years to reach to this point to have formal realization of what we need to do. I am wondering how much time it will take to bring the change that we are dreaming for. Is 2020 an achievable target to turn the decades or perhaps centuries long built perceptions and habits.

On the other hand as a researcher of engineering education I wonder how soon will we see plateau for the field. We have a few short term targets. But are there any long term targets and can we find some?

Challenges in classification

In Sorting Things Out, the author pointed out that 'No real-world working classification system that we have looked at meets these "simple" requirements...' That would strike me 2 weeks ago when I was working on my project where I need to seek for a perfect ontology for Engineering Education, but not now. I realized that I cannot classify ENE in such a way that it meets any of the three properties mentioned in this book. Instead, a quasi-perfect classification should be constructed so robustly that it well supports including, excluding, transiting of elements. Uncertainty and emergence of new elements keep deviating a real-world classification from Bowker's ideal model.

I have similar question with Sensen after reading Perry's Model. In my opinion, this verbalized Positions are far from standing as a classification. But maybe I am wrong because I used my quantitative head to make this judgment. Still, I am very interested in how this model can be applied to put students into positions correctly.

Thanks, Junaid, for sharing the 6-level learning in group discussion two weeks ago. So it's not a new concept to me any more. Also, I saw a few figures from Kolb Model somewhere before, but this article elaborates in greater depth which inspires me with the following question: while teaching in multi-disciplines can benefit from this model, would it also overstate the inter-discipline differences so that this preconceived guidance hinders the diversity and innovativity of both teaching and learning?