Theory
Use of Theory
 Description
 Explains causes of behavior
 Prediction
 Control
Evaluating
 Comprehensive
 Clarity and explicitness
 Consistency (with logical framework)
 Parsimony (concise, simple, easy)
 Heurism (generate research ideas)
What is the population?
How was it developed?
Is it descriptive?
Is it explanatory?
Is it prescriptive?
Is it heuristic?
Is it useful in practice?
All theory reflects authors’ perspective
Student Engagement
Linked positively to desired student outcomes.
Theory of involvement
Most empirical studies show all students
Benefit in some way
Good practices
Faculty contact and cooperation
Active learning
Feedback
High expectations
Time on task
Respect for diverse learning
Measures
 AAC&U Wabash Study
 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)
o Shows student engagement can be measured across institutions
 Beginning College Student Survey of Engagement
 College Student Expectations Questionnaire
 College Student Experiences Questionnaire
What makes a difference in college?
 Faculty
o Class assignment require integration
o What they thing and value
 Institutional policies and practices that promote engagement high impact activities
 Attending MSIs (minority servicing institutions)
o Student abroad
o Learning communities
o Distance learning
o Working on campus
Psychosocial Identity Development
Erikson’s Identity Development Theory
 Pioneer clinical psychologist (adolescence through adulthood)
 Based on Freud
 Identity development external as well as internal
 Eight stages of development set off by crisis
o Stage 1 = trust/mistrust
o Stage 2 = autonomy/shame and doubt
o Stage 3 = initiative/guilt
o Stage 4 = industry/inferiority
o Stage 5 = identity/identity diffusion
o Stage 6 = intimacy/isolation
o Stage 7 = generativity/stagnation (continue to grow)
o Stage 8 = integrity/despair
 Identity changes with crisis
 Highly descriptive but hard to study
Marcia’s Ego Identity Statuses
 Grounded in Erickson
 First empirical prototype
 Critical variables
o Exploration
o Commitment
o Sexual decisions
 Identified four identity statuses
o Foreclosure – (no crisis/commitment)
o Moratorium – (crisis/no commitment)
o Identity achievement – (crisis/commitment)
o Diffusion – (no crisis/no commitment)
Josselson’s Theory ( 1971)
 Identified development for women
 Studied 60 women, seniors 20-22 from 4 colleges over 30 years, follow up study
of 30 in 1996 spanning 22 years
 Identified
o Foreclosures – Guardians
o Identify achievements – path makers
o Moratoriums – searchers
o Identity diffusions- drifters
Gender Differences
 Constantinople claimed men developed more psychosocial maturity
 Others found women scored higher
 Resolve processes of intimacy differently: men’s competence through career
choice, women through relationships
Arthur Chickering
Built on Erickson’s identity and intimacy
Reisser joined in 1993
Saw identity established as core developmental issue of students
First Research 1959-1965
Proposed 7 vectors of development
Students move at different rates no linear or solo
Vectors:
 Developing competence
 Managing emotions
 Moving through autonomy toward interdependence
 Developing mature interpersonal relationships
 Establishing identity
 Developing purpose
 Developing integrity
Chickering and Specific Populations
 Women’s development different from men’s interpersonal relationships; later for
men; autonomy later for women
 Women higher intimacy and more tolerant at start of college
 HBCUs: women higher than men on interpersonal relationships, autonomy and
life purpose, however men higher in identity development of four years
Student Affairs Applications:
Programming
 Needs assessment
 Evaluation of program impact
Individual interactions
 Advising
Environmental interventions
 Residential learning
 Relationship to faculty
 Collaboration with other students
Chickering Critique
 Failure to address Asian and Native American students
 Lacks specificity and precision – too general
 Failure to address motivational levels
 Multicultural issues not covered adequately
 Overall significant impact, easy to understand and use
 Most well known
Intellectual and Ethical Development
William Perry (1968, 1981)
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Research on how students make meaning of teaching and learning (what was it
about his sample?)
 Perry’s “scheme” simplistic to complex
 Nine positions
o Dualism – black or white
o Multiplicity – honoring diverse views
o Relativism – opinions not equal
o Commitment – initiates ethical development
 There may be stops, regressions, “timeouts”
 First Assessment of themes qualitative – time
 Knefelkamp and Widick created Measure of Intellectual Development, Baxter
Magolda and Porterfield Measure of Epistemological Reflection
 All measure first five
 Used widely in literature as outcomes measure
Applications of Perry
 Informal assessment
 The developmental instruction model (DI)
 Classroom – (difference in undergraduate and graduate)
 Student Affairs – residence halls, career planning, advising
Critique of students
 Date of study
 Narrow/wide range of students
 Including both intellectual and ethical development
 Influenced Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule work on women, BaxterMagolda’s work on women and men, King & Kitcherner reflective judgment:
Parks faith development
 Labels
Moral Development
Kohlberg, Rest and Gilligan
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Transformation in form or structure of thought
Dominant for over 40 years
Based on psychology and moral philosophy
Focuses on process, not content
Stages on moral reasoning (6 stages, 3 levels)
o Pre-conventional – no understanding of rules
o Conventional-identify with rules
o Post-conventional or principled – separate, self-choice
 Based on Piaget and Rawls
Rest (1979)
 Objective measure of moral development (DIT) defining issues test
 Adapted Kohlberg
 Examined two elements of thinking; how expectations are known and shared;
how interests are balanced
 View more broad than Kohlberg, more complex (percentages within “stages”)
 Developed schemas; personal interest, maintain norms, post-conventional
Application of Kohlberg
 moral education, “just communities”
 cognitive conflict to develop higher-level thinking
 research supportive college friends connects with growth in moral judgment;
others show very little gain in Greek organizations with one exception
Gilligan and Women’s Moral development (1982/1993)
 significant departure from Freud (women as deviant, men standard, Kohlberg
using results from men-women later, but still found “underdeveloped”
 In a Different Voice (30 years, girls and relationships)
 Themes of care and justice
 Three levels and two transitions
o Orientation to individual survival, transition; selfishness to responsibility
o Goodness as self sacrifice; transition goodness to truth
o Morality of non-violence
 SA Applications for Gilligan
o Ethic of care
o Examining underlying assumptions in policies and structures
o Staff development to recognize balance necessary
o Justice: power, domination, assertiveness, strength, control of emotions,
independent leadership
o Care: involvement, interdependence, concern for relationships, sharing
information, inclusion
Five perspectives for women
 Silence
 Received knowledge
 Subjective knowledge
 Procedural knowledge
 Constructed knowledge
Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, Tarule
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Influenced by Gilligan and Perry
Ways of knowing are perspectives, not stages
“voice” used to describe intellectual and ethical development
Student affairs can emphasize connection rather than separation
Theory has relevance in classroom and student affairs-connected thinking
Model of epistemological Reflection
 Cognitive development measure that included both men and women
 Longitudinal study
 Contains four stages
o Absolute knowing – knowledge certain
o Transitional knowing – acceptance that knowledge not certain
o Independent knowing – mostly uncertain
o Contextual knowing- convergence of gender-related patterns
 More similarities than differences between men and women
 Absolute, first year; transitional, sophomore, junior and senior; independent,
graduate
 Not based on diverse populations
 Social construction evident
 Applications are four major findings
o Validating students as knowers
o Situating learning with experience
o Jointly constructed meaning
o Relational aspect of these three crucial
 Work combines men and women, emphasizes practice
King and Kitchener (1994)
Reflective Judgment Model
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ten-year longitudinal study, 80 participants, interviews
o How do people decide what they believe about problems?
o Seven stages
 Pre-reflective thinkers-do not recognize uncertainty
 Quasi-reflective thinkers – difficulty with reasoned conclusions
 Reflective thinkers – active construction of knowledge
Kolb’s Theory of Experiential Learning (1984)
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Kolb describes as adult development
Roots in Dewey, Lewin and Piaget, Jung
Explores the role of experience in the learning process
Defines learning as: “the process whereby knowledge is created through the
transformation of experience.”
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Learning as four-stage cycle-series of steps
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o Concrete experience – CE (feeling)
o Reflective observation – RO (watching)
o Abstract conceptualization – AC (thinking)
o Active experimentation- AE (doing)
Form a habitual way of responding to the learning environment
o Different preferences for polar opposites
Four learning styles emerge
o Convergers (AC and AE – good problem solvers who tend to be
technically oriented)
o Divergers (CE and RO- imaginative, meaning and values oriented)
o Assimmilators (AC and RO – inductive reasoners, create theories by
integrating disparate ideas)
o Accommodators (CE and AE – doers, implementers, risk takers)
Believed learning style set the course for personal development along stages:
o Acquisition
o Specialization
o Integration
Learning Style Inventory (LSI)
o 12 items related to learning
o Concerns raised by two-dimensional structure
o Revised in 1993
o Informal assessment done by asking participants to relate to styles
Applications
o Counseling
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Career planning
Staff development
Orientation
Classroom/workshop situations
Integrative Theories
Ecological
Kurt Lewin (1936)
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Behavior = Person’s Interaction with the Environment
Basis of Ecological Models
o Human ecology- Interrelationship of humans with environment
 Lays foundation
 Ecology defined as adaptation to environment
 Understanding ecosystems
 Greenhouse analogy
o Developmental ecology –(Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1989, 1993)
psychological approach environment and its influence on
development of person
 Comes from psychological perspective
 Adapted Lewin – development is a function of the
interaction of a person and environment
 Focus on individual interaction – environment is the
context
o Campus ecology – reciprocal relationship between student and
campus environment
 Introduced by Banning & Kaiser
 Study of relationship between student and campus
environment
 Different components-theories
 Behavior setting – Barker (1968) People behave in
similar ways in specific environments
 Subculture approach – Walsh (1978) – describes
environment by attitudes, values, roles of members
 Personality types – Holland (1966) shifted weight to
person
 College culture (1970) culture is formed by
accumulation of behaviors across individuals
o Theories
 Social ecological approach (Moos, 1973,1979) measured
physical and architectural
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Transaction approach (Pervin, 1967, 1968) –behavior can
be understood by transactions between individual and
environment
All approach integrated by Strange and Banning (2001) for
campus design
Self-Authorship
Constructive – Developmental Theories
Keagan (1982-1994)
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Theory of self-evolution, evolution of consciousness
Based on Piaget, but added developmental portions
Development is effort to resolve tension between desire to be different and desire
to be immersed in the environment
 Levels of Consciousness
o Order 0 – infants
o Order 1 – Childhood
o Order 2 – instrumental mind – thinking more logical
o Order 3 – socialized mind- relating across categories- dualistic
o Order 4 – Self-Authoring Mind ( college aged student, reasonable
expectation)
o Order 5 – Self-Transforming mind
 Modern life required fourth order consciousness – self-authoring –
the ability to generalize across abstractions deciding on your owntaking ownership
Baxter Magolda (1999 – 2008)
 Self-authorship
 Definitely longitudinal
 Identified phases
o Following formula
o Crossroads
o Becoming the Author of One’s Life – Kegan similar
o Internal foundation- spirituality may play role – voice
 Outcomes
o Learning partnerships model used in student affairs
Faith and Spirituality
 Fowler (1978)
o Influenced by Kohlberg and Piaget
o Stages
 Primal
 Intuitive-projective
 Mythic-literal
 Synthetic-conventional – still seeks external
 individuative-reflective- self authored – young adulthood
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 conjunctive – midlife and beyond
 universalizing –rare
Parks (1986a)
o Considers role of higher education
o Forms of knowing (2000)
 Authority-bound (dualistic)
 Unqualified relativism (relativism)
 Probing commitment
 Tested commitment – advanced adulthood
 Conventional commitment – midlife
Schlossberg Transition Theory (1984)
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Theory of adult development
o Four categories
 Contextual perspective
 Developmental
 Life span
 Transitional perspective
 Transition defined as: “any event, or non-event, that results in changed
relationships, routines, assumptions and roles”
 Additional part of the process is coping
 Application shown in Cormier and Hackney counseling model (1993) assisting
individuals in transition
Cormier and Hackney counseling model
 Five stages: relationship building, assessment, goal setting, interventions,
termination and follow up
 Egan (1994) model: exploration, understanding and coping
 Many areas for application in college students
Holland’s Theory of Vocational Personalities and Environments (1985/1992)
 Both typology and person –environment
 Six basic personality types
 Six corresponding environments
 Success depends on proper “fit”
 Popular in career development
 Work as vocational counselor
 Six personality types
o Realistic (manual, mechanical, technical)
o Investigative (science and mathematics)
o Artistic (language, art music, drama, writing)
o Social (educate, inform, enlighten)
o Enterprising (leadership, persuasion)
o Conventional (clerical, computational)
 Vocational Preference Inventory (1985)
o Includes 160 occupational titles
o First instrument developed for personality type
 Self Directed Search (1994)
o Self-administrated, self scored instrument
 Seems to fit vocational choice
 Gender, race and culture differences shown-most regarding distribution
 Applications
o Career development
o Counseling
o Orientation and advising
o Residence life
o Student activities
Myers-Briggs Adaptation of Jung’s Theory Personality Type (1923/1971)
 Indentifies individual differences in how people take in and process information
 Carl Jung, psychoanalyst
o Myers and briggs studied more than 20 years
o Developed myers-briggs type indicator
o Keirsey and Bates (1984) expanded MBTI
 Most extensively used for assessing personality type
 Each item related to one of four preferences
o Extraversion-introversion
o Sensing-intuition
o Thinking-feeling
o Judging-perception
Keirsey Temperament Sorter (1984)
 Derived from MBTI
 Instrument shorter and more readily available
 Cautions remain for validity
Critiques
 Few studies on racial differences
 Consistently found that African American students more sensing and thinking that
white students
 Hispanic adults more feeling and extravert
 More women feeling than thinking (men)
 Gender and racial bias possible cause
 Applications
o Career choice
o Residence life
o Discipline
o Counseling
o Advising
o Learning and teaching styles
o Retention
Social Identity Development
How does ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, and other social identities affect my
life?
Key Concepts
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Privilege and Oppression
o Mostly invisible to those who possess it
o McIntosh (1989, 2003)
o White privilege
o Social class privilege
o Gender privilege
o Heterosexual privilege
o Ability privilege
o Christian privilege
Multiple Identities
o Conceptual Models (Jones and McEwen (2000)); Abes, Jones, and
McEwen (2007)
Diversity Development
o Model: Chavez, Guido-DiBrito, and Mallory (2003)
Racial Identity Models
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Cross and Fhagen-Smith’s Model of Black Identity Development ( 2001)
o Foundation in Cross (1991) five stage to four stage model
o Life span model of developing black identity
o Three patterns
 Nigrescence Pattern A – establishing identity through interaction
with parents and others, birth through adulthood
 Nigrescence Pattern B – not socialized, conversion in adulthood
 Nigrescence Pattern C – expansion or modification during
adulthood
o Helms’s Model of White Identity Development (1992)
 Most widely known
 Created to raise awareness of the role of white people
 Two phases – abandonment of racism and evolution of a
nonracist identity
o Rowe, Bennett and Atkinson’s White Racial Consciousness Model (1994)
 Awareness of being white and implications for relationships with
those who are not white
 Derived from Phinney (1989)
o Rowe et al.
 Types of attitudes – unachieved white racial consciousness and
achieved white racial consciousness
o Ferdman and Gallego (2001) - Latino Identity Development
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 Race secondary to cultural and ethnic distinctions
o Kim – Asian American Identity Model (1981, 2001)
 Asian American identity and white racism not mutually exclusive,
unlearn stereotypes, positive identity essential
Horse (2001) American Indian Identity Development
o Role of colonization essential
o Characterizes consciousness
 Language and culture
 Validity of genealogical heritage
 Adopting a worldview respecting traditions and philosophical
values
Ethnic Identity and Acculturation
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Socially constructed like race? (Barth, 1969)
Grounded in ego identity (Erickson, 1968)
External and internal
o External – language, media, transitions, friendships, functions
o Internal – Cognitive, moral, affective
Acculturation
o Changes related to adaptation
Phinney (1990) Model of Ethnic Identity Development
o Based on Erickson-consistent with Marcia
o Three-staged model focused on commonalities
Torres et al. (2003) Ethnic Identity of Lations/Hispanics/Chicanos
o Rapid increase in research last 15 years
o Early research (1999) focused on biculturalism
o Through sophomore year in college
Asian/Americans
o Most ethnically diverse group
o No linear model applies
o Recommend against generalization
Native Americans/American Indians
o Indigenous Americans
o Customs tribe
o Dominant culture at odds with cultural beliefs
African Americans/Blacks
o No universal mode
o Research interchanges race and ethnic identity
Multiracial Identity
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Definition of multiracial
Deficit
o “marginal personality “ a result
o Seen as internal rather than external issue
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Stage Theories
o Poston (1990) Three stage theory ending in self acceptance
Typology Approaches
o Cortes (2000) rejected idea of integrated multiracial identity
 Based on anecdotal information ( not based on actual research but
based on observed and reported by others)
Ecological
o Exposure to culture, location factors contributed to identity
Renn Ecological Theory of Mixed Race Identity Development
o Influenced by Bronfenbrenner
o Conducted three studies
o Focused on ecological factors (space and peer cultures-fit) and labels
 Monoracial, multiple monoracial, multiracial, extraracial,
situational
 College very difficult due to development of “cultural legitimacy
and loyalty” (Wallace, 2003)
Sexual Identity Development
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Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Identity Development
o Early literature focus on sexual behavior
o Looked at societal movement away from “illness”
Cass (1970) Based on clinical work in Australia
o Six stages – minimal awareness (conflict between self concept, behavior
and perception of others) and acceptance to integrated identity ( identity
synthesis)
o Included disclosure and activism
Fassinger (1996) Model of Gary and Lesbian Identity Development
o Addressed cultural and contextual influences/role of disclosure and
activism
Fassinger (1998)
o Two parallel processes – individual sexual identity and group membership
identity
o Each includes four phases – awareness, exploration,
deepening/commitment, and internalization/synthesis
D-Augelli (1994a) Model of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Development
o Introduced life span model
o Three sets of variables; personal and subjectivities, interactive intimacies
and socio-historical connections
o Stressed impact individuals have on their own development
Heterosexual Identity Development
o Assumption of normative status
o Essentialist approach-identity innate
o Worthington, et al. (2002) Multidimensional Model
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Heterosexual identity development as the process in which
individual heterosexual persons acknowledge sexual needs, values,
sexual expression, partners
Six interactive factors
 Biology, microsocial context, gender norms, culture,
religion, systemic homomnegativity
Gender and Gender Identity Development
Foundational Concepts
 Sex is biological, gender is social construct
 Transgender – gender and biological sex does not align
 Lev (2004) Binary Model – Fluidity across categories (male, female, man,
woman, masculine, feminine, heterosexual, homosexual)
Gender Identities
 Cisgender and transgender
 Ben (1983) – Gender Schema Theory-includes elements of cognitive
developmental and social learning theories
 Kin to self- authorship
 Sex role types
o Feminine
o Masculine
o Androgynous
o Undifferentiated
Transgender Identify Development
 Mostly medical and clinical psychological
 Studies on college students only recent
 Bilodeau (2005) adapted D’Augelli