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Shapiro took those seventy essays and scrutinized them by way of
“Measure of Intellectual Development (MID)” (7-8), the “Diedrich
Scale” (8-9), and the “Levels of Context Scale” (9-12), for
“Rhetorical Maturity,” “a term borrowed from Susan Miller (1980)
who coined it in an attempt to capture the quality that is
missing from the poor papers written by unskilled adult writers”
(4) and that is defined by “language competence,” the ability
“to arrive at and limit a topic, and develop and organize a
text,” and the “awareness of audience.” For Shapiro, the
results gathered through such research instrumentation offered a
very clear answer: “[S]tudents’ texts which had been identified
on the MID at higher levels of cognitive development scored
significantly higher on the Diedrich Scale than students’ texts
which had been characterized at lower levels of cognitive
development” (12). But what does this mean exactly? She
explains:
The results of this study indicate that levels of
cognitive development among college students do have
a significant relationship to their writing
competence. […] According to Perry (1970), students
at dualistic levels of cognitive development think in
a qualitatively different way from students who have
matured from that limited egocentric, right/wrong
perspective into Multiplicity, and Contextual
Relativism which allow for multiple perspective
taking. (15)
Furthermore, she claims that, “Theoretically, the movement from
an egocentric to a decentered perspective should manifest itself
in an awareness of alternative points of view. The evidence
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