cognitive development: the missing link

I've always been amazed by the work of cognitive psychologists. Through experimentation, carefully crafted and executed methods, their work gives us insight into the human mind. For those of us in the business of education, including librarians, knowing and understanding how the mind works gives us some guidance for the ways we shape our interactions with students and the academic and social environments we create for them.

What got me thinking about cognitive psychologists is an column in the latest issue of RUSQ titled, "Cognitive Development: The Missing Link in Teaching Information Literacy Skills". Here, the authors (and I'm a little confused at who actually wrote this piece -- it says Rebecca Jackson as he guest columnist, and Lori Arp and Beth S. Woodward are editors) map the ACRL Information Literacy Standards to levels of cognitive development written about by William Perry and others.

The article presents an excellent review of literature about cognitive development and its relationship to information literacy and student-library interactions. In many cases, freshmen enter college in a stage of development described as dualistic: there are rights and wrongs, and that is it. There are Authorities who are always right, and those that hold other positions are wrong. By the end of a four-year program, students have generally progressed into a mode described as multiplicity -- there are still right and wrong answers, but not everything is necessarily known yet. Still, though, there is an ultimate truth.

What students often cannot grasp, even upon graduation, is the relativistic level of development. In this stage, students realize that answers to questions largely depend on context, and there may not be a be-all end-all right and wrong answer. Solutions can be on a scale of grays as opposed to strictly black and white.

This sheds some light on some of the struggles I had with students who came to see me in one-on-one appointments. Last semester, I helped many students find articles for their annotated bibliographies for a COMM 101 class - a freshman-level class on mass media. Many were discouraged when, even with a librarians help, they were unable to find that one, perfect article that supported their ideas. The notion that they would have to piece together multiple articles and synthesize them into new knowledge (or at least demonstrate an understanding of the varied perspectives in the articles) is a task that can only be accomplished by those who understand that knowledge is contextual and relative.

If my freshmen are still in the dualistic stage, then they believe that there is one singular way to argue a topic. For example, one of the topics a student came to me was about reality television and its popularity. She wanted to write a paper explaining that this popularity was due to audience members seeing reflections of themselves on television. When we explored the literature, she quickly became discouraged when our search results didn't 'hit the nail on the head'.

After reading this article from RUSQ, I imagine she was looking for confirmation of her own thoughts.

In Perry’s dualism, students see the world as either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. Authorities (with a capital A) have all the answers; if they do not, either they are not legitimate Authorities, or the answers are only temporarily unknown. Students believe that there are right answers for every question. They will only look for information that agrees with their beliefs. At early stages of dualism, students simply ignore uncertainty or place it in the “others” category: us/others.

Despite turning up many articles on reality television and its representation of various cultures and groups of people, she may have been feeling at a loss because we couldn't find an article echoing her hypothesis. She wasn't ready, cognitively, to process the varied articles we got and use them to support an argument. She also wasn't ready to change her opinion and let it develop as she read and searched.

Thinking about it, she may have also been frustrated with me. I couldn't come up with the 'perfect search' to find what she knew had to be out there. In fact, she even said, "Someone has got to have written about this!" suggesting that she thought the answer, confirmation of her hypothesis, was in existence.

How can we work with students that are not yet ready to think about searching in flexible, 'relativistic' ways?

One successful interaction I had may be an option. As I worked with a student on her topic about depictions of women in advertising in the 1950s, we shifted our topic to match the articles that we were finding. While we didn't find much about her initial topic (how women's lives were shaped by advertisements), we did start seeing many articles about body image. We then expanded our search to include other decades, and she decided upon writing about how depictions of women's bodies have changed over the years, culminating in a description of Dove's "real women" campaign.

I think she left happy because we did find articles that supported a thesis. They were there, available, and obviously a 'right' way to go because there were articles about it, satisfying the need for a 'right' answer.

However, over the course of the semester, she no doubt started to develop a little more as she read -- comparing and contrasting the viewpoints in the articles themselves. I don't think I sabotaged a change to learn how incomplete human knowledge is -- she'll learn that as she goes through college -- but I did get her to a stage where she felt comfortable.

The ACRL Information Literacy Standards are noble goals, but this scenario illustrates how some of them require students to be more developed cognitively than they are:

For instance, Standard One, outcome 1.f. specifies that the information literate student “recognizes that existing information can be combined with original thought, experimentation, and/or analysis to produce new information.” The discovery that the student makes his own knowledge is one that comes at the Relativistic position.

We can't expect students to be okay with getting results tangential to their search topics. We must understand why they are always looking for that 'perfect' article that sums up their ideas perfectly. We must try to think about this when were serve our students. If we do want to help them develop, we should be explicit about how they can combine thoughts and ideas in article to support their own thoughts and ideas. We must do so in a concrete way, and always realize that when they check the "scholarly" limiter in a database, to them it may mean, "These articles represent 'right' ideas," not "These articles probably come with a lot of supporting evidence and reasoning."

Yay, RUSQ! Great article!

That said, it take a great deal of time and patience and the ability to listen to, observe, and diagnose student actions and responses to determine if they fit the characteristics of any given stage. It is reminiscent of the kinds of experiences my wife, a social work student, encounters while at her field placement during therapy sessions.

Hmm.. The librarian as information therapist... I like!

Federated Searching and Scaffolding

CogSci Librarian's latest post on the future of reference is unlike some of the doomsday and defensive prophesies I've seen floating around the library world. I highly recommend giving it a read and contributing to the discussion though your own posts or in the comments.

In response to her point about searching, I'll be glad to see the day when federated searches across databases from a variety of vendors can work smoothly. We have Metalib (our edition is called "Search Tools") at the University of Michigan, and while I teach it to intro-level classes, I generally avoid it when getting into upper division and graduate level courses because of the metadata that's available and similar across databases.

Metalib does a fine job with what it's working with, but until there's some standardization in terms of what fields are available to search and searching capabilities from vendor to vendor, we're being reduced to lowest common denominator when performing a federated search. I can't perform complex boolean searches because some of the databases searched during a federate search don't support them. Thesauri are database-specific in many cases, so controlled vocabulary is out of the question. I'm sure we'll hit the same problem when we try to make a federated search engine that does our catalog, our finding aids, our subscription databases.

This, in my mind, is cutting off any ability for us to help patrons construct great searches. If keyword searching is going to be as good as it gets with federated searching, I do think that I'm fairly useless when showing students metalib -- why even ask a librarian when they're not going to be able to get better results than your keyword searching?

I guess that's why I try to focus on evaluation of results and the importance of citing things properly when I teach lower-division college courses. Generally, the assignments they receive in COMM 101 call for only 6 resources. They can find 6 resources using keyword searching in Metalib. So, why focus on controlled vocabularies and complex combinations of Boolean operators when I can take a holistic approach to writing research papers? Why not spend time with them talking about evaluating the things they find? Why not help them use RefWorks to cite their stuff, and give them idea about how to paraphrase and incorporate their findings into a coherent paper? If they can find 6 items through Metalib, they don't need more than that in terms of 'power searching' ... yet!

It's those upper-division courses when their topics are a bit more focused and they need to find articles that may not fit into a single keyword search. It's the grad students who are going to be producing lengthy tomes of research -- much longer than my 101 students' 5-page papers. I'll save my schpiel on using databases' native interfaces and getting the most out of strategic searching for then. What my 101 students need is something else.

So! In response to CogSci Librarian: no, I don't think that federated searching dumbs down the search process. I think it places limitations on the control you have when searching. Many educational practitioners (myself included) use scaffolding -- slowly letting students become more and more independent. I don't want to dump strategic searching on them until they've become comfortable incorporating sources into their papers. I'll let Metalib handle the searching. But as they grow, and as they progress in their studies, we do need to remove the scaffolding.

I saw a poster at ACRL, and if any reader out there knows who made it, or remembers the title, I'd love to hear about it. Or maybe it wasn't a poster. Shoot, now I can't remember where I heard this, but it impressed me: instead of just doing a 'library session' for an instructor, they will provide a list of topics they could cover with the amount of time it would take to cover each one. For example, I sent my faculty this message yesterday:

Why schedule a library session this Fall? While your students may have had a session in using the library before, there's so much more I can help them with. Take a look at the topics here, and pick one or two for me to cover in a library session. This way, if you're pretty sure you student have been introduced to Mirlyn, I don't have to teach it!

- Popular vs. Scholarly vs. Peer-Reviewed
- Introduction to Library Resources (Mirlyn, Search Tools)
- Managing, Citing, and Incorporating References (RefWorks, Style, and Avoiding Plagiarism through effective use of quotes and paraphrasing)
- Finding Primary Source Material (newspapers, news broadcasts, transcripts throughout time and from around the world)
- Fitting Wikipedia (and Google Scholar, and the WWW) into Research Papers

...or, I could custom design a session for your class's special info needs. Build a library session into your course's Fall schedule and let me know when and where to be.

I didn't incorporate the time limits into mine -- I figured opening the channel of communication between my faculty and me would be a good starting point for a discussion of how to incorporate information literacy standards into the class. We'll see how this goes. I shouldn't have sent it on a Saturday. Now it'll be buried in a bunch of weekend spam and junk mail when they check for it.

Anyway, I thought this approach was an elegant solution for a problem I've noticed: faculty members know they students have had a library session before, so they don't think I should come teach again, because they've already heard it. This way, they can get an idea of what I can teach, and they can customize their session for their students' needs, and skip the intro stuff if they feel their students don't need it.

Yes! I wish I could remember who gave me this idea! I owe them oodles of coffee.

Anyway. Long post. Thanks for reading. It's been very interesting becoming part of the blogosphere over the last few weeks. Thanks for the comments and making me feel welcomed.

Eric