Patricia M. King

This book explores how college students address life challenges and develop the self-authoring capacities needed to deal with the ambiguities and complexities of life after graduation. Based on the in-depth interview portion of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, this book draws on almost 1,000 interviews with a diverse cohort of 315 students from six institutions over 4 years. It traces these students’ journeys, documenting the wide variety of pathways they followed, the range of contexts in which their experiences took place, the liberal education outcomes associated with these experiences, and the factors that affected quality and impact. The authors critique current student development theory and offer a new interactionist model to guide future study in the field, inviting readers to adopt five habits of mind to guide their praxis and practice to promote student development. This valuable resource is written for educators working in higher education institutions – both faculty and student affairs professionals – who want to help students get the most out of their college experience.

This book explores how college students address life challenges and develop the self-authoring capacities needed to deal with the ambiguities and complexities of life after graduation. Based on the in-depth interview portion of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, this book draws on almost 1,000 interviews with a diverse cohort of 315 students from six institutions over 4 years. It traces these students’ journeys, documenting the wide variety of pathways they followed, the range of contexts in which their experiences took place, the liberal education outcomes associated with these experiences, and the factors that affected quality and impact. The authors critique current student development theory and offer a new interactionist model to guide future study in the field, inviting readers to adopt five habits of mind to guide their praxis and practice to promote student development. This valuable resource is written for educators working in higher education institutions – both faculty and student affairs professionals – who want to help students get the most out of their college experience.

How do students learn to reason and think about complex issues? This book fills a critical gap in our understanding of a long-neglected facet of the critical thinking process: reflective judgment. Drawing on extensive cross-sectional and longitudinal research, King and Kitchener detail the series of stages that lay the foundation for reflective thinking, and they trace the development of reflective judgment through adolescence and adulthood. The authors also describe the implications of the Reflective Judgment Model for working with students in the classroom and beyond--encouraging educators to think differently about interactions with their students and to create ways of more effectively promoting the ability to make reflective judgments.