Introduction: Test for Intellectual Growth

Of the two learning objectives I wished to examine, intellectual growth was the most challenging to measure, both because of its difficulty to describe and identify and because of the logistical problems of tailoring the classroom research project to the design of the course.

Although schemes of intellectual development by scholars such as Perry, Bloom, King & Kirchener and others offer useful models for tracking cognitive growth in general, I was more interested in how much students had grown in relation to the main goal of the course, i.e. to critique the way the desires of the capitalist-consumerist business world constitutes society’s values. More specifically, I was looking to see whether students had gained a more complex, sophisticated, and nuanced response to the same key question over the course of the semester. I was hoping students would begin to see more shades of gray, more exceptions, qualifications, and consequences in their responses.

To measure whether students had developed in this way, I, in collaboration with Lisa Kurz (I.U. Campuswide Writing Program), designed a project that would compare very similar intellectual work as exemplified in student papers from week one and from week fifteen. For both papers, students had to respond to the same prompt with an original thesis for which they found support from various sources in a synthetic manner. However, because the two essays fell in very different places in the semester, I could hardly demand papers of the same length or weight them equally gradewise. Hence, while Paper I was two pages long and worth 2% of the student’s final grade, Paper IV could be four to five pages long and constituted a full 20% of the grade.

While these disparities in length and weight would seem to guarantee the appearance of intellectual growth with respect to the course inquiry question and thereby vitiate the research data, evidence does not bear this conclusion out. First, a few students did, in fact, unfortunately show a failure to grow intellectually over the course of the semester. Second, close comparisons of the two essays of the eleven students who did grow intellectually show that the content of the course did, in fact, contribute to their final, more complex way of thinking. Hence, I do not believe that the disparity in length and weight played much of a role in this project. In fact, given the typical profile of a LAMP student (i.e. very motivated), I rather expect that students worked equally hard on each essay, regardless of its relative weight in the final grade calculation.