The following is the blurb for one of the many presentations Dennis and I made and will serve as a brief overview of the sort of work we were doing.
24TH NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON ISSUES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

EXPLORING COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY IN BASIC SURVEY COURSES:
IMPLICATIONS FOR COURSE DESIGN AND TEACHING STRATEGIES

Dennis Duginske and Gregory Singleton
Northeastern Illinois University

Dennis Duginske received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has been a therapist and teaching faculty member at Northeastern Illinois University since 1973. Prior to that he was a special education teacher at both the elementary and secondary levels at a variety of institutions ranging from a reformatory school to the University of Chicago Lab and Orthogenic schools.

Gregory Singleton received his Ph.D. from UCLA. He has been on the faculties of Northwestern University and Memphis State University. He has been in the Department of History at Northeastern Illinois University since 1972. He has published widely in the area of the social history of religion in the U. S.

SESSION FORMAT

We will make a brief orienting presentation, then involve the participants in interactive work with an instrument to assess levels of cognitive complexity, then proceed to a general workshop on course design considerations and teaching strategies.

DESCRIPTION

Students come to a basic survey course with a wide variety of life experiences and cultural backgrounds, and there is a vast literature on addressing these differences in undergraduate teaching. Equally important is the wide range of levels of at which they process information. Usually we don't have a grasp of that diversity until the end of the course. Over the past decade the presenters have used an adaptation of the Loevinger Sentence Completion test at the beginning of the basic U. S. History survey course to discover this range. The results have had a profound affect on the design and execution of this course. In this session we will simulate the experience of the first class session and we will jointly explore the implications for design and strategy.
ABSTRACT

The two presenters have been colleagues for twenty years. Early in their collegial relationship they discussed quite different but related problems. Duginske was concerned about the problem of ego development among traditional college-age youth at a commuter university. Singleton was concerned about the difficulty students were having in going beyond memorization of facts and dates to analysis and interpretation. Duginske was engaged in research on his problem using, among other instruments, the Sentence Completion Test developed by Jane Loevinger at Washington University. Duginske and Singleton adapted the inventory for specific application at the beginning of the survey course.

Over the last decade we have used this instrument (with periodic revisions) to gain some understanding of the levels and range of cognitive complexity (from simple dichotomous thinking to integration of complex and often paradoxical ideas) we find in a given class. Singleton receives no information about an individual student, but does receive a general profile for the course. As a result, he has developed a flexible general syllabus that becomes more specific after the profile has been generated. Duginske returns the scored instruments to the students during the second week of class and presents a lecture/discussion on levels of cognitive complexity and intellectual development. As a result students quickly grasp the conceptual components of the course and realize that U. S. History is merely the subject matter for the course. Conceptualization is the real topic.

We will present a summary of our experiences to date and involve the participants in a simulation of the initial class experience. We will then move to a workshop on course design and teaching methods.
If these considerations interest you, please write to gregory.singleton@yahoo.com . I will respond to requests for additional information, and will be grateful for suggestions.
RETURN TO HOME PAGE.