Learning Partnerships

Like many of the multi-authored Jossey-Bass volumes, the book is intended as a good reference rather than as a good read, but it is a worthy addition to the library holdings of those who are mindfully trying to deepen their understanding of adult intellectual development. Baxter Magolda's books published under the Stylus label seem better reads to me. My rating of this book is as a reference, and the varied perspectives furnished by the multiple authors of chapters make this valuable.The Self-Authorship model of Baxter Magolda is quite sound and especially useful in being applicable across disciplines. Her work is frequently cited in compilations of key literature in adult learning, so the jaundiced comments by one reviewer about "corroding away credibility" were surprising. Baxter-Magolda's model derives from longitudinal studies on college students. Since William Perry used longitudinal studies to discover the sequence and the stages of adult intellectual development, there has not been any significant longitudinal study of college students whose results failed to map well to Perry's model.Early suspicions that Perry's findings applied only to "privileged white male" students at highly selective universities have long since proven unfounded. The monumental work of King and Kitchener in Developing Reflective Judgment established that the nature of intellectual development in its stages and sequence hold true across diverse institutions of higher education. To know one of the adult models established from longitudinal studies well enables general understanding of all the others, since they are basically studies of a common phenomenon. To date, there is no research to reveal that any race, culture or gender is advantaged in ability to achieve high level thinking, but a college professor who teaches is disadvantaged by not learning at least one of these adult developmental models. Starting with Perry's Forms of intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years is a best choice. The discoveries in this classic hold true today. Thereafter, the contributions furnished by later investigators like Baxter-Magolda and in the book reviewed here will make a lot of sense.Baxter Magolda's recent book in 2010 extends looking at this development across students from varied cultures. It's one I also recommend highly.

I consider myself a fairly literate person, scientist, educator, but I was unable to sink in to any part of this book and extract useful information. Dr. Baxter Magolda's original longitudinal study of young adults seems very interesting indeed; this book of short papers, which seems to be an attempt to get more mileage out of the study, fails both to further explicate her "theories" and to critically evaluate them. Perhaps it is my science background that makes me expect clear language of a proportional length to the amount of information being communicated, but I was ultimately defeated by the long, swimming passages describing the seven points of one of the five aspects of the theory (not precisely, but my lack of ability to say precisely is telling), all bound together with a mistiness about young adult development that is no doubt admirable as a motivation to pursue this work but acts as acid in the reporting, corroding away credibility. My next step should of course be to look at Dr. Baxter Magolda's original and ongoing peer-reviewed publications; no doubt the valuable data and conclusions she has gathered will be able to shine through outside of the context of this awful book.

The delivery is very fast! Good job!