Can Colleges Teach Thinking?

By Ezra Bowen

Lots of information may be crammed into their heads, but U.S. college students too often fall short in the ability to think critically and reason their way to a sound conclusion. What they seem geared to, says Professor Kurt Fischer of the Harvard School of Education, is giving the "answer, as opposed to learning how to make a good argument." Some experts blame the nation's colleges for this, saying they fail in their vaunted claim to teach people to think. But two researchers who have devised a new way to measure reasoning power now believe most college students are not ready for mature critical thinking. Wisdom, the researchers suggest, really does come only with age.

"Some claim that we can teach critical thinking to people of any age if we can figure out how to do it," says Karen Strohm Kitchener, 43, assistant professor of education at the University of Denver. "What we are saying is that ((such thinking)) is a developmental process and that mature judgment doesn't develop until the middle or often the late 20s."

+ Kitchener and Patricia King, 36, assistant professor at Bowling Green State University's college of education in Ohio, began work on the theory ten years ago when both were doctoral candidates at the University of Minnesota. They have now completed a study of some 1,000 "reflective-judgment interviews" with males and females of varying backgrounds, ages 14 to 55. The subjects evaluated four problems that have no right or wrong answers but are, in Kitchener's words, "the kind of problems most commonly faced in adulthood." Example: "Creation stories . . . suggest that a divine being created the earth and its people. Scientists claim, however, that people evolved from lower forms." Among the responses to this, one 18-year-old freshman brushed off anthropologists' arguments for evolution and came down on the side of the biblical dogma. But a graduate student in social science called both views "sets of ideas that have evolved from different positions . . . and so it's very hard to argue against one or the other and to present supporting statements." Similar analyses were offered by others, independent of religious background.

From such results, Kitchener and King postulate that reflective judgment tends to hatch in the preteen years and to progress, ideally, through seven stages. Individuals at the first two of these levels, they say, react like the freshman, accepting preordained conclusions that come from supposedly incontrovertible authority. At the next two stages, generally from 18 to 21, people grow skeptical of the notion that anything can be rationally known and justify beliefs by what feels right. At levels five and six (ages 22 to 25), represented by the graduate student, they see reality as a matter of interpretation, with knowledge entirely subjective. The highest level concedes personal bias but assumes that inquiry can cut through to approximations of reality -- for example, accepting the preponderant physical evidence of evolution while not necessarily denying the more abstract claims of creation.

King and Kitchener's work departs from widely accepted theories like those of the celebrated Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. He also described levels of readiness for certain kinds of reasoning, concluding that logical thought begins by age 7 and by 12 escalates to the ability to deal with abstractions like the future. "His emphasis was on logical reasoning," says King. "We are looking at a different domain of problem solving." In that domain, adds Kitchener, "logic alone is not enough for mature judgments."

Though still experimental, the reflective-judgment yardstick has attracted the interest of cognitive scholars around the country. One psychologist who edits a journal in the field privately describes Kitchener and King as "on the cutting edge" of as yet uncharted research. Some experts, like Irving Sigel, research scientist for the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., consider the interviews a promising new means for assessing "whether a student has the skills to go about understanding and solving new problems." Harvard's Fischer is particularly hopeful about the potential for measuring the broad-gauge effects of a college education. Indeed, Kitchener will be joining Fischer this year and next to study just how successful colleges may be in developing critical thinking.

With reporting by Joelle Attinger/Boston and Harry Kelly/Chicago