Assessing Meaning Making and Self-Authorship E-Book

Marcia B. Baxter Magolda

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B ASHE-ERIC Report Series (AEHE)
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 239

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

One reason so many students fail to achieve complex learninggoals may be that they rely too heavily on others' opinionsabout what to believe, who to be, and how to relate to others. The meaning-making capacity of self-authorship provides a basisfrom which to understand and learn from one's experiences;without this, students are at a loss to know how to makeintentional choices about what to believe and how to act.Similarly, without a means to access and assess students'meaning making, researchers are at a disadvantage in deciding howto interpret students' academic performance and otherbehaviors, and educators are at a disadvantage in translatingfindings into the design of new programs and services. This monograph is for those who are interested in understandingself-authorship and its assessment, and in using this approach intheir own work. Drawing from well-established theories andextensive longitudinal research including nearly two thousandinterviews, it offers a detailed account of how young adults'capacities become more complex and adaptive over time. Those whounderstand the role of meaning making will be better able todocument its effects on educational outcomes and provide betterinformation to decision makers about program effectiveness. Each monograph in the series is the definitive analysis of atough higher education problem, based on thorough research ofpertinent literature and institutional experiences. Topics areidentified by a national survey. Noted practitioners and scholarsare then commissioned to write the reports, with experts providingcritical reviews of each manuscript before publication.

Leseprobe

Contents

Executive Summary

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Nudging Minds to Life: Self-Authorship as a Foundation for Learning

Meaning Making and Collegiate Learning Outcomes

The Nature of Meaning Making: Constructivist-Developmental Assumptions

Self-Evolution and the Journey Toward Self-Authorship

Conclusion

Assessing Self-Authorship and Its Evolution

Assessment Challenges

Assessment Formats

Four Interviews to Assess Self-Authorship

Conclusion

Development of the Ten Positions in the Journey Toward Self-Authorship

Baxter Magolda’s Study

Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education

Nuances of Self-Authorship

Trusting External Authority: External Positions

Trusting External Authority

Tensions with Trusting External Authority

Recognizing Shortcomings of Trusting External Authority

Developmental Progression in External Meaning Making

Entering the Crossroads: Predominantly External Positions

Questioning External Authority

Constructing the Internal Voice

Developmental Progression in Entering the Crossroads

Leaving the Crossroads: Predominantly Internal Positions

Listening to the Internal Voice

Cultivating the Internal Voice

Developmental Progression in Leaving the Crossroads

Self-Authorship: Internal Positions

Trusting the Internal Voice

Building an Internal Foundation

Securing Internal Commitments

Developmental Progression in Internal Meaning Making

Using the Self-Authorship Assessment Guide

Assessing Student Characteristics and Experience

Example of a Phase 1 Summary (Excerpts)

Assessing Developmental Meaning Making

Example of a Phase 2 Summary (Excerpts)

Links Between Development and Experiences

Working Through Difficult Summaries

The Value of Listening to Students

Appendix: Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education: Qualitative Research Team

References

Name Index

Subject Index

About the Authors

About the ASHE Higher Education Report Series

Recent Titles

Assessing Meaning Making and Self-Authorship: Theory, Research, and Application

Marcia B. Baxter Magolda and Patricia M. King

ASHE Higher Education Report: Volume 38, Number 3

Kelly Ward, Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, Series Editors

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The ASHE Higher Education Report is indexed in CIJE: Current Index to Journals in Education (ERIC), Education Index/Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), ERIC Database (Education Resources Information Center), Higher Education Abstracts (Claremont Graduate University), IBR & IBZ: International Bibliographies of Periodical Literature (K.G. Saur), and Resources in Education (ERIC).

Advisory Board

The ASHE Higher Education Report Series is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), which provides an editorial advisory board of ASHE members.

Ben Baez

Florida International University

Amy Bergerson

University of Utah

Edna Chun

University of North Carolina Greensboro

Susan K. Gardner

University of Maine

MaryBeth Gasman

University of Pennsylvania

Karri Holley

University of Alabama

Adrianna Kezar

University of Southern California

Kevin Kinser

SUNY – Albany

Dina Maramba

Binghamton University

Robert Palmer

Binghamton University

Barbara Tobolowsky

University of Texas at Arlington

Susan Twombly

University of Kansas

Marybeth Walpole

Rowan University

Rachelle Winkle-Wagner

University of Nebraska – Lincoln

Executive Summary

Learning to think critically and in a complex way about a wide range of issues, demonstrating intercultural competence when interacting with others, and making discerning judgments about moral and ethical issues are common learning goals in higher education. Learners often struggle to achieve these goals because they have yet to develop the meaning-making capacities that support their achievement. Meaning-making capacities reflect how people make sense of (or interpret) their experience, including their assumptions about how to decide what to believe, construct their identities, and engage in relationships with others. The complex meaning-making capacity of self-authorship, characterized by the ability to internally coordinate external influence in the process of defining one’s beliefs, identity, and social relations, forms a basis for meeting the complex challenges that college students and other adults face as they navigate life. To assist learners in developing these meaning-making capacities, educators need to understand how these capacities evolve and how to assess learners’ meaning making.

This monograph is designed to help its readers understand how the capacity for complex meaning making evolves from late adolescence to early adulthood and how this capacity is reflected in (and undergirds) how students make sense of their experiences. Readers who understand the role of meaning making will be better able to document its effects on educational outcomes and provide better information to decision makers about program effectiveness. Our collective scholarship on student development and assessment supports self-authorship as a necessary but insufficient condition for achieving complex college learning outcomes. Thus, increased ability to assess self-authorship development can contribute to educators’ efforts to understand, document, and promote these learning outcomes.

Our long-standing research programs addressing the assessment of cognitive development—Baxter Magolda’s (1992) Epistemological Reflection Model and King and Kitchener’s (1994) Reflective Judgment Model—undergird our work on assessing self-authorship. As co-principal investigators of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNS), we designed a four-year longitudinal study of contemporary college students’ meaning making informed by Baxter Magolda’s twenty-five-year longitudinal study of young adult development. Over one thousand interviews from Baxter Magolda’s study and over nine hundred WNS interviews enable us to describe a detailed portrait of the evolution of meaning making during and after college from a diverse group of participants. In this monograph, we show how young adults’ capacities become more complex and adaptive over time and describe the strategies we have developed to assess and document these changes.

The nuanced portrait of self-authorship development that emerged from these two studies offers numerous possibilities regarding the complexity of development from the late teens to the early forties across three dimensions: cognitive (How do I know?), intrapersonal (Who am I?), and interpersonal (How do I relate to others?). From this rich data set, we discerned a continuum of ten positions within three overarching meaning-making structures. The first three positions (comprising the first major meaning-making structure: External meaning making) portray variations of trusting external authorities to define one’s beliefs, identity, and social relations. The middle four positions (the Crossroads: the second major structure) illustrate movement away from uncritical reliance on external authority and simultaneous movement toward constructing one’s internal voice to coordinate external influence. The last three positions portray self-authorship, or trusting one’s internal voice to guide one’s life (the third structure: Internal meaning making). The ten positions and the rich narratives through which we describe them offer both researchers and educators greater insight into how adults approach learning, their identities, and their social relations.

A key facet of assessing self-authorship is that it requires discerning the distinctions between how people think (meaning-making structure) and what they think (content). In addition, meaning-making structures evolve gradually and often overlap; people may use more than one structure simultaneously or various structures depending on the context; and meaning-making structures may vary across the cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal dimensions of development. We have constructed self-authorship interviews and an accompanying Self-Authorship Assessment Guide to address these complexities. We include the Guide in this monograph to assist readers in understanding the nuances of assessing the evolution of self-authorship. We also describe the process we used to train the WNS qualitative research team of over sixty graduate students and professionals to assess meaning making.

We hope this nuanced portrait of the developmental journey toward self-authorship, the detailed Assessment Guide, and our story of using this Guide with a large research team will provide educators and researchers with processes to understand, assess, and promote young adults’ meaning-making capacities.

Foreword

There has been a lot of talk about the need to assess student learning outcomes. Colleges and universities across the country are scrambling to find the means to show that they are making a difference in student learning. Their concern is prompted by accreditation efforts, efforts by national associations (for example, the Voluntary System of Accountability authored by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and the Association of State Colleges and Universities), and published critiques of higher education (books like Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Higher Education?, and others). The question on everyone’s mind is, How do we know if college is making a difference in student learning? This monograph provides a tool to help answer part of this question through the lens of meaning making and self-authorship. Self-authorship, one of my favorite student development concepts, is centered on how individuals make sense of information around them and use that information to help inform how they make decisions and, in turn, figure out who they are as a result. Unlike other student development theories, self-authorship and the process of meaning making represent a holistic approach to development. As a theory it does more than look at cognition or moral judgments or identity separately; rather, it combines these aspects into a single lens. I find the theory useful because it shows how people evolve from late adolescence to adulthood and is therefore relevant to a wide array of today’s students, including graduate students.

When Marcia Baxter Magolda and Patricia King contacted me about their writing a monograph on self-authorship and meaning making as a means to explain how it can be assessed and used more easily by colleges and universities as an outcome, I was elated. A monograph that not only explains the theory in depth but also talks about how it can be assessed and documented as a learning outcome was more than I could have hoped for. This monograph delivers on its initial promise. The authors bring their expertise as the authors of the Epistemological Reflection Model (Baxter Magolda, 1992) and the Reflective Judgment Model (King and Kitchener, 1994), along with interviews from almost two thousand students, to explain how meaning making and self-authorship develop throughout the college experience and into adulthood. The authors lay out a new conceptualization of developmental meaning making that extends beyond what they have written before. They offer a more finely grained portrait of development (what they call positions) to enable readers to understand meaning making and its role in student learning. The inclusion of the training component and the Assessment Guide are new, detailed resources; both are aimed at making this process accessible for readers to use in their own work. Thus, the application component focuses on assessment practice, that is, how to gather information to inform the design of educational practice.

Although meaning making is not a typical learning outcome, the ability to identify the lack of complex meaning making may be a potential reason for students’ underperforming on other outcome measures. Meaning making in general, and self-authorship in particular, is seen as necessary but insufficient for numerous collegiate outcomes, including critical thinking. This monograph explains how meaning-making capacities (including the capacity of self-authorship) relate to and are distinct from collegiate outcomes and explains how an understanding of meaning-making structures can contribute to facilitating student learning.

This book is written for scholars of higher education as well as for faculty and administrators. It will be of particular interest to assessment specialists who are interested in understanding self-authorship and its assessment and using it in their own work. It will also be of use to those of us who teach graduate classes in higher education administration or student affairs. The monograph expertly combines extensive discussions of theory and its creation, along with a helpful guide to assessing self-authorship and meaning making. While meaning making may not be the only outcome that needs to be assessed, it is an important one because it has the capacity to capture what happens in class along with what happens outside the classroom. This is a thoughtful, exciting addition to the ASHE Higher Education Report Series. I hope it is as enlightening to you as it was to me.

Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel

Series Editor

Acknowledgments

A project of this scope requires many sources of insight and substantial resources. We are deeply appreciative of the support, involvement, and constructive feedback provided by our communities of scholars. Because of the centrality of the Self-Authorship Assessment Guide in this monograph, we begin by noting that the refinement of this Guide has been a team effort, one informed by the insights of many individuals. In particular, we wish to acknowledge the contributions of several colleagues who made particularly strong and sustained contributions to refining this Guide. Three are former or current doctoral students from the University of Michigan: James P. Barber (now at the College of William and Mary), Anat Levtov (now at Bowling Green State University), and Rosemary J. Perez. Kari B. Taylor (associate director for student development for the University Honors Program at Miami University) also contributed many thoughtful insights about ways to capture developmental nuances within this Guide. She also played a major role in conveying development in visual form through the conceptualization of ; for this we appreciate her resourcefulness and patience. We thank Kelsey Chun, a Miami University student, whose artistic talent translated this conceptualization into .