Cognitive Development: The Missing Link in Teaching Information Literacy Skills

Solutions?

So what can librarians do to help students become more information literate, given their various stages of cognitive development? Baxter Magolda cautioned:

Awareness that students use these assumptions to guide their learning helps educators understand the basis for students’ persistent efforts to find out the “right” answer, the “right” length of paper, the “right” concepts to study for a test, or the “right” major.²⁷

First, no one can assume that a student of a given age or year in college is within a particular stage. To help ascertain a students’ stages, librarians need to spend some time talking to them, getting to know how they perceive their assignments. It is possible to get some idea of their position or stage by the way they explain their assignments, by their confusion over the various resources they are being asked to use, by their interest in finding different opinions on an issue, or by their inability to judge resources they retrieve in a search.

No matter what their stage, Perry’s suggestion was that “the learner requires the support of some elements that are recognizable and familiar.”²⁸ Important to their development at any level is a sense of community and support. Librarians should take students with them in the search for information to answer their questions. They can also show students that they do not always have all the answers–that they, too, are learning. King and Kitchener offered several suggestions for teaching, but two are especially important: After cautioning that teachers (and librarians) should show respect for students, they say, “If students perceive disrespect or lack of emotional support, they may be less willing to … take the intellectual and personal risks required for development.” And later, King and Kitchener also suggest that librarians should “Teach students strategies for systematically gathering data, assessing the relevancy of the data, evaluating data sources, and making interpretive judgments based on the available data.”²⁹ It is also important to keep in mind that students in the early stages of development may not recognize librarians as authorities; thus, it is extremely important for librarians to reach out to teaching faculty to ensure that they confirm for their students the authority of librarians with whom they may interact.

At the same time, students at any stage of development, if they feel they are in a safe and supportive environment, also need a challenge. According to Kitchener et al., “data suggest that learning environments which challenge absolutistic assumptions may be particularly important for college freshmen. By contrast, older students may need help in learning to use evidence to evaluate alternative perspectives. …”³⁰

A student may be at different levels of development in different areas of study. Social sciences and humanities courses, which offer the least amount of “right” answers, may pose more problems than more scientific courses. And students who are faced with too much confusion may regress to a more dualistic position. Certainly, using a library can cause such confusion among many students; so librarians need to recognize that just because students seem to be at a very low level of cognitive development when they are using the library, it may only be because they are faced with frustration and confusion.

Librarians who have written on cognitive development also have shared suggestions. Mellon notes that for students at the dualistic positions, only basic strategies for solving information problems should be taught, though students should be made aware of more complex information-seeking processes, and they should obviously be encouraged to ask questions of librarians. For multiplistic students, “It is useful at this stage to mention that search strategy is a very individual thing and that the aim of a library instruction program is to produce an independent library user who has developed a successful problem-solving search strategy.”³¹ With relativistic students, librarians are free to discuss all the complexities of information retrieval and evaluation and analysis of sources.

Fields, in a recent article on ill-structured problems, recommends scaffolding–giving prompts or asking questions that help students build from what they already know. So, for instance, asking students what resources they are already familiar with can lead to conversations on other resources similar to what they know, but which stretch their development a little more. However, Fields cautions, “learners need to be encouraged and even pushed to move beyond their present level of knowledge, but the moves must be graduated so as not to fall completely outside the learner’s knowledge base and developmental stage.”³² In an earlier article, Fields simply says, “In terms of information literacy instruction, librarians should focus on ‘connection,’ ‘collaboration,’ and ‘firsthand experience.’”³³

King and Kitchener offer several pages of suggestions for identifying the stages of reflective judgment. These pages also include instructional goals for each level, sample assignments, examples of difficult tasks for each level, and types of developmental support for each level. This section of their book is very useful for spelling out specifically how to recognize the various levels and how to work with students at those levels.³⁴ For example, at Stage 2 reasoning, one of the characteristic assumptions of reasoning is “Evidence is not a criterion for establishing truthfulness.” An instructional goal of this stage would be to “Give reasons for beliefs beyond relying on the word of an authority.” A difficult task at this stage is “accepting that even authorities do not have right or wrong answers for some issues.” And one type of support for instructional goals at this same stage would be to “Attempt to legitimize students’ feelings of anxiety when confronted with multiple perspectives on an issue.”³⁵

Returning to the use of the information literacy standards, it might be useful to think about which outcomes fit which positions. For instance, at the lower undergraduate levels, outcomes like Standard One, 1.a. addressing the identification of a topic and determining what types of information are needed would be a doable goal. Students at the lower developmental levels can often decide on a topic, but challenging them to determine what information they need might be just the push to further their development. For Standard One, Performance Indicator 2, several of the outcomes would be ideal for students at the lower developmental levels. This indicator focuses on concrete information, such as knowing how information is produced, knowing the scope and purpose of different information sources, and knowing the various formats of information. Librarians must remember that students at this level are ready to receive information; this is an easy task for them, but they can also be encouraged to think about how their topics are related to the types of information available. It might be a useful exercise to map all of the standards, indicators, and outcomes to the various cognitive levels of students, keeping in mind, of course, the need to keep students comfortable while at the same time offering challenges. That research is an area for future exploration, and is beyond the scope of this article.

In conclusion, the introductory quotes can each possibly be related to the developmental stages or positions of the range of students librarians encounter every day, either in classes or at the reference desk. To be armed with the best information most helpful for working with students and teaching them information literacy skills, librarians need to understand learning and teaching styles. Equally important, however, they should understand how levels of cognitive development, or reflective judgment, can have an enormous impact on students’ ability to learn the skills that fulfill the goals of information literacy.

Correspondence concerning this column should be addressed to: Lori Arp, Assistant to the University Librarian, Northwestern University Library, 1970 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208; e-mail: L-arp@northwestern.edu.

Beth S. Woodard is Staff Development and Training Coordinator and Reference Librarian Head at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 300 Library, 1408 West Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL 61801; e-mail: bswoodar@uiuc.edu. Rebecca Jackson is Head, Social Sciences and Humanities Department, Iowa State University Library, Ames.

References

1. ACRL, “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/informationliteracycompetency.htm (accessed Dec. 30, 2006).
2. William G. Perry Jr., Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).
3. Constance A. Mellon and Edmund Sass, “Perry and Piaget: Theoretical Framework for Effective College Course Development,” Educational Technology 21, no. 5 (May 1981): 29-33.
4. W. S. Moore, “Overview of Perry Scheme.” (accessed Dec. 30, 2006).
5. Mellon and Sass, “Perry and Piaget,” 30.
6. Perry, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development, 121.
7. Patrick G. Love and Victoria L. Guthrie, “Perry’s Intellectual Scheme,” New Directions for Student Services 88 (Winter 1999): 5-15.
8. Barbara K. Hofer and Paul R. Pintrich, Personal Epistemology: The Psychology of Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 21.
9. Patricia M. King and Karen Strohm Kitchener, Developing Reflective Judgment: Understanding and Promoting Intellectual Growth and Critical Thinking in Adolescents and Adults (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 53, 61, 71.
10. Marcia B. Baxter Magolda, “Evolution of a Constructivist Conceptualization of Epistemological Reflection,” Educational Psychologist 30, no. 1 (2004): 31-42.
11. Ibid., 37.
12. Ibid.
13. Love and Guthrie, “Perry’s Intellectual Scheme,” 14.
14. King and Kitchener, Developing Reflective Judgment, 36.
15. Marcia B. Baxter Magolda, “Helping Students Make Their Way: Good Company for the Journey,” About Campus 6, no. 6 (Jan./Feb. 2002): 2-9.
16. Mellon and Sass, “Perry and Piaget”; Constance A. Mellon, “Information Problem-Solving: A Developmental Approach to Library Instruction,” in Theories of Bibliographic Education: Designs for Teaching, ed. Cerise Oberman and Katina Strauch (New York: Bowker, 1982), 75-89.
17. Mellon and Sass, “Perry and Piaget,” 30.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 31.
20. Mellon, “Information Problem-Solving,” 80.
21. ACRL, “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.”
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Barbara K. Hofer and Paul R. Pintrich, “The Development of Epistemological Theories: Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing and Their Relation to Learning,” Review of Education Research 67, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 88-140.
25. Michael Lorenzen, “The Land of Confusion? High School Students and Their Use of the World Wide Web for Research,” Research Strategies 18, no. 2 (2001): 151-63.
26. Ibid., 161.
27. Marcia B. Baxter Magolda, “Intellectual Development in the College Years,” Change 38, no. 3 (May/June 2006): 50-54.
28. William A. Perry, “Different Worlds in the Same Classroom: Students’ Evolution in Their Vision of Knowledge and Their Expectations of Teachers.” (accessed Dec. 30, 2006).
29. Patricia M. King, “Reflective Judgment: Educational Implications.” (accessed Dec 30, 2006).
30. Karen Strohm Kitchener et al., “Sequentiality and Consistency in the Development of Reflective Judgment: A Six-Year Longitudinal Study,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 10 (1989): 73-95.
31. Mellon, “Information Problem-Solving,” 81.
32. Anne M. Fields, “Ill-Structured Problems and the Reference Consultation: The Librarian’s Role in Developing Student Expertise,” Reference Services Review 34, no. 3 (2006): 405-20.
33. Anne M. Fields, “Women’s Epistemological Development: Implications for Undergraduate Information Literacy Instruction,” Research Strategies 18, no. 3 (2001): 227-38.
34. King and Kitchener, Developing Reflective Judgment, 250-54.
35. Ibid., 250.

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