Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

Maturity and Perry’s Model of Intellectual Development: A Study
of College Students’ Writing and Thinking,” a report submitted
to the NCTE Promising Researcher Award Competition. It was
based upon a quantitative research project she had undertaken
with a “sample of 70 essays […] drawn from a data bank at the
Center for Applications of Developmental Instruction (CADI) at
the University of Maryland, College Park” (10), the “population
represented […] includ[ing] both traditional and nontraditional
aged undergraduate and graduate students across a broad spectrum
of majors” (10). The purpose of Shapiro’s research project was,
as she states in her abstract, to “investigate the relationship
between the intellectual maturity of college students and
evidence of rhetorical maturity in their writing.” Later, she
explains herself further:
The purpose of this study was to clarify some
elements of the relationship between the intellectual
maturity of college students and their writing
ability in general. […] As researchers and
teachers, we should not take for granted the notion
that college students who are maturing
intellectually, that is, recognizing and coming to
terms with the complexity of reality, are by
definition, automatically improving their ability to
communicate those new ideas and understandings in
writing. (1)
From this, she puts her research question simply: “The question
raised in this research is whether [college student writers’]
skills at communicating subtlety, uniqueness, and depth of
thought keep pace with their growing intellectual complexity”
(2). In order to approach some understanding of this question,
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