Affect and Meeting the Needs of the Gifted Chemistry Learner: Providing Intellectual Challenge to Engage Students in Enjoyable Learning - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 135

Whilst chemistry teaching has traditionally concerned itself largely with setting
learners well-defined tasks, school and college science teaching increasingly
includes consideration of socio-scientific issues which require more than simple
logical application of concepts (Sadler, 2011 ; Sheardy, 2010 ). Arguably such
activities offer particular potential to challenge gifted learners (Levinson, 2007 ),
who may spontaneously raise questions about such issues (Tirri, Tolppanen,
Aksela, & Kuusisto, 2012 ).
Of relevance here is the work of Perry ( 1970 ), who explored intellectual and
ethical development of students attending the prestigious undergraduate colleges of
Harvard and Radcliffe. Perry developed a scheme to describe the stages through
which learners passed, something akin to the Piagetian stages of cognitive devel-
opment (Piaget, 1970 /1972). Perry was not the only person who explored aspects of
moral development, and indeed Lawrence Kohlberg

s (Kohlberg & Hersh, 1977 )
scheme is probably more widely known. However, Perry

'

s scheme did not seek to
separate development of intellect from development of a personal value system.
Moreover, some of Perry

'

s key findings can be considered to be of particular
relevance to science/chemistry education (Finster, 1989 , 1991 ). Perry

'

s scheme,
unlike the better known work of Piaget, did not exclude individuals from sometimes
taking retrograde steps in relation to the hierarchy of levels or stages, and this
reflects longitudinal research into the development of moral motivation which
suggests a general trend towards greater degrees of moral motivation but with
some individuals actually presenting downward shifts between measurement points
(Nunner-Winkler, 2007 ).
In particular, Perry found that adolescents and young adults seem to commonly
pass through an intellectual journey away from a sort of absolutism, through a
relativist phase towards a more sophisticated stage when value judgements can be
made in nuanced ways. Perry

'

s original work is quite detailed, offering nine stages,
but for present purposes, this simple three-stage simplification reflects this key
issue. In caricature, then, Perry found that on starting college new students often
expected their teachers to be a source of absolute knowledge and to refer them
towards authorities that were considered to be correct. Instead, their teachers often
directed them to diverse and apparently conflicting sources that offered opposing
views (especially in the humanities and social sciences). The initial response to this
was a shift from seeing knowledge in terms of truth to being a matter of opinion,
i.e. different people have different opinions, and in education we learn about these
different opinions, and perhaps we choose the opinion we wish to hold whilst
recognising it is just that—an opinion. In this

'

stage, there can be no
arbiter of truth or right, because it all comes down to different people holding
different opinions—and everyone is entitled to an opinion.
Students could (sometimes slowly) move beyond this naive relativism to come
to understand that even if we can no longer aspire to simple absolute knowledge, we
can still form judgements that are principled and argued from a coherent position.
So the final stages of this process, which Perry suggested even very able students
might not complete during their undergraduate years, link to the highest level of
the taxonomy of educational objectives in the affective domain, with its focus

relativist

' '