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03 April 2008

ignorant certainty

From Derek Bok's Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More (Princeton UP, 2006):

[I]nvestigators have found that many entering freshman arrive at college in a condition of "ignorant certainty," believing that most or all problems have definite answers, that ignorance may keep them from knowing the answer, but that the truth can be found by consulting the right expert.  During the college years, most students do make significant progress (from "ignorant certainty" to "intelligent confusion"), but large majorities remain in a naive relativist state, persuaded that many problems have no single correct answer and that none of the possible answers is necessarily better than the others.  Only a small minority of seniors emerge convinced that ill-structured problems are susceptible to reasoned arguments based on evidence and that some answers are sounder than others.

So that's our task, folks.  How do we do it, though?

(Bok is drawing on the work of Patricia M. King and Karen S. Kitchener in Developing Reflective Judgment (1994) and Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, How College Affects Students, Vol. 2 (2005).  The utterly phenomenal quoted phrases are from Barry M. Kroll, Teaching Hearts and Minds (1992).

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