Drawing from firsthand accounts, Perry traces a path from students' adolescence into adulthood. His nine-stage model describes the steps that move students from a simplistic, categorical view of knowledge to a more complex, contextual view of the world and of themselves. Throughout this journey of cognitive development, Perry reveals that the most significant changes occur in forms in which people perceive their world rather than in the particulars of their attitudes and concerns. He shows ultimately that the nature of intellectual development is such that we should pay as much attention to the processes we use as to the content.

In a new introduction to this classic work, Lee Knefelkamp--a close colleague of Perry's and a leading expert on college student development--evaluates the book's place in the literature of higher education. Knefelkamp explains how the Perry scheme has shaped current thinking about student development and discusses the most significant research that has since evolved from Perry's groundbreaking effort.

Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years is a work that every current and future student services professional must have in their library.

What current users of the Perry scheme may not realize is how meticulous he was in constructing it. This book charts the origins of the project from his counseling of students at Harvard & Radcliffe in the early 1950s, through his creation of the Checklist of Educational Values in the mid-50s, to the semi-structured personal interviews with 109 students from the classes of '62 and '63. Although he never lost sight of his ultimate goal -- developing a tool to help people who counseled college students on their journey toward greater self-understanding -- he invested heavily in methodological innovations, creating valid and reliable measures toward that end. Working with a team of graduate assistants, he created interview & coding protocols that are a model of careful scholarly work.

Two other points about the book's value today: First, it contains extensive quotations from the actual recorded transcripts of the interviews, thus allowing us to see for ourselves the correspondence between the model's Position descriptions and the students' own words. Second, Perry's scheme was built on a very strong normative position. He firmly believed that intellectual and moral growth are desirable outcomes of a student's college years. He wrote of the courage students needed to assume the risks of forward movement toward higher Positions in his scheme.

In the last paragraphs, Perry called for a new model of education that would support students in their risk taking, and his call is just as relevant today as it was 30 years ago.