41
Are They Ready Yet? Developmental Issues
sound like many of our students. The research indicates the average doctoral student is
between stages 5.5 and 6.2, and stage 7 thinking is fairly rare (King & Kitchener, 2002,
2004). Students tend to move across the stages in fits and starts rather than in a continu-
ous linear fashion. Students also move faster through the lower stages than through the
upper stages. In a pattern repeated in seven different longitudinal studies, high school
students moved on average 2.5 stages over 10 years; over the same period college students
moved on average 1.29 stages, and doctoral students .54 stages (King & Kitchener, 2004).
The data indicate students in high school are consistently prereflective thinkers who make
decisions on the basis of beliefs that are not open to evaluation, but that in college students
shift to quasi-reflective thinking. Students move from “ignorant certainty” to “intelligent
confusion” (King & Kitchener, 2004, p. 15).
Most developmental epistemological theorists assert that these stages are complex,
more akin to waves than points on a linear process (Baxter Magolda, 2004; Hofer &
Pintrich, 1997; King & Kitchener, 2004). People are not “in” a particular stage; it is
more the case that people have a typical mode of reasoning but will think across two or
three stages. Development is uneven and moves in spurts with overlapping waves of
typical thinking. King and Kitchener (2004) found most people tended to use their
primary reasoning strategies in two-thirds of the reflective judgment protocols, with the
other third of their responses evenly divided between the stage above and stage below
their typical thinking stage. However, no individual of the thousands in King and
Kitchener’s (2004) studies ever had nonadjacent reasoning patterns (e.g., stage 3 and 5
reasoning).
Developmental Gender Differences
Baxter Magolda (1992, 2004), in a longitudinal study that examined, among other issues,
gender differences in epistemological development, interviewed 101 men and women
annually over the course of what has now been 16+ years. Her work supports the assertion
of an identifiable developmental sequence in epistemological beliefs, while positing several
gender-related (but not gender-determined) variations in the process. Baxter Magolda
identifies a developmental sequence of four ways of knowing in which epistemology is
based upon the nature of learning rather than on the nature of knowledge. Like the theo-
ries before it, this theory posits a gradual change in students’ approach to knowledge and
learning, moving from absolute knowers for whom knowledge is certain and received from
authority figures, to contextual knowers for whom knowledge is constructed and evaluated
via evidence.
Through the interviews, Baxter Magolda found gender-related differences in the
approaches to knowledge and knowing. While men tended to follow masculine patterns
and women feminine patterns, men and women were found using each pattern. At the
lower levels, the pattern of knowing with masculine connotations tends to focus on mas-
tering and demonstrating knowledge. Debate, challenging and being challenged by others,
and using logic in an impersonal and unemotional way are seen as the appropriate forms
of learning and demonstrating knowledge. The pattern of knowing with feminine con-
notations tends to focus on receiving, listening, and recording rather than mastering