Kurfiss provides a practical overview of intellectual development.¹¹ She integrates developmental stages into four levels:

• Level 1: Dualism, knowledge as facts. Students believe that knowledge is a collection of discrete facts; therefore learning is simply a matter of acquiring information delivered by professors, who are viewed as the authority of right answers.
• Level 2: Multiplicity, knowledge as opinion. Students realize that conflicting opinions, theories, and points of view are inevitable features of knowledge. Without understanding the reasons behind the different perspectives, they attribute them to personal opinions, all of which they treat as equal.
• Level 3: Relativism, knowledge as reason. Students recognize that not all opinions are equal; points of view should be backed up by good logic and evidence. They learn the importance of evaluating an issue by weighing multiple factors.
• Level 4: Commitment in relativism, knowledge as commitment. Individuals take a position and make commitments of what they choose to do or believe. They are committed to nurturing ideas and developing themselves intellectually.

Research indicates that students entering universities are dualistic or early multiplistic. By the time they graduate, they are able to deal with differing points of view, but still have difficulty relating evidence to argument.¹²

Being aware of students’ developmental stages helps librarians to look at IL from student perspectives. For example, students that are reluctant to explore different information types probably are still at the dualistic level. Students that do not have the patience to evaluate information sources do not have an attitude problem, they lack understanding of the complex nature of knowledge. Librarians can play a key role in helping students progress to higher stages of intellectual development through IL instruction, both in the classroom and through the reference interaction. In particular, IL teaching should consider students’ intellectual stages for effective reception, and at the same time target instruction to facilitate their progress to higher stages.

Librarians should also be aware of how cognitive tasks relate to intellectual development. For this purpose, the set of cognitive skills defined by Bloom in his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives is a useful instrument.¹³ Bloom defined six major classes of skills within the cognitive domain: knowledge/remembering, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Bloom’s hierarchy cannot be mapped linearly to Kurfiss’s intellectual development levels; nevertheless, students at level 1 and level 2 naturally rely more on the “lower-order” cognitive skills when learning. They may find it hard to exercise those “higher-order” thinking skills, which become more proficient only as students advance to higher development levels.

To help students grow intellectually, librarians can infuse their teaching with elements of critical thinking by designing intervention that facilitates the use of higher-order thinking skills.

The Library at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) offers a one-credit course on IL under the general education free-elective framework. The course consists of a one-hour session every week during one semester.

Undergraduate programs at HKUST are provided by three schools: the School of Science, the School of Engineering, and the Business School. Most students have stronger academic exposure in scientific and technical aspects than arts, humanities, and social sciences. Students are most likely at level 1 of Kurfiss’s intellectual development levels.

A team of librarians teach the IL course. In the spring 2010 semester, the author was the instructor of two sessions: one on applying critical thinking in information evaluation, another on the use of socioeconomic data. The following sections elaborate on the latter.

The instructor delineated these teaching objectives to guide her focus of class content:

• Introduce students to the rich varieties of socioeconomic data fulfilling different information needs.
• Guide students in discovering how socioeconomic data are shaped by definitions and collection methods.
• Help students understand the nature of socioeconomic data by comparing with scientific data with which they are more familiar;
• Guide students in exploring aspects of data evaluation and use.
• Help students understand data-collection methods and dissemination channels so they can devise effective strategies to locate different types of socioeconomic data.

Following the move toward outcome-based teaching at HKUST, librarians specify intended learning outcomes for almost all library classes. They clearly communicate intended outcomes to students at the beginning of the courses or classes; in most cases, the outcomes also guide the assessment of teaching.

After the class on socioeconomic data, students were expected to be able to

• describe what socioeconomic data are about;
• describe the differences between socioeconomic and scientific data;
• craft workable strategies to access various socioeconomic data; and
• evaluate data quality on the basis of reliability and authority.

The class was composed of a mixture of lecture and activity sections. The lecture sections aimed to provide either background knowledge for the activities or to consolidate what students had learned in the activities.

The activities were carefully planned so that the intellectual skills required progressed from low to high along Bloom’s hierarchy. When the author went through a mental rehearsal, she attempted to take a student’s point of view to receive the activities. She projected what background information and guidance a student at the dualistic level would need in order to achieve the intending learning through the activities . This is a crucial exercise for instructors preparing active teaching lessons.

At the same time, the activities facilitated students’ intellectual development by leading them to exercise the higher-order thinking skills. Using their understanding of scientific data as a stepping-stone, the session led them to the concept that socioeconomic data that measure and describe human activities can be defined and interpreted in multiple ways. The understanding that data (and knowledge) does not necessarily have objectively “accurate” value (like physical constants) challenged students’ dualistic worldviews. The appreciation of multiplicity boosted students to reach the next level in intellectual development.

Although the reflection activity was not meant to be an assessment tool, students’ replies revealed whether their perception of the lesson matched the instructor’s planning and expectation. Nineteen students out of twenty-five posted their reflection to the online course forum. In the description of what they learned, a number of students explicitly used the verbs “analyze” and “evaluate.” For instance, one student wrote “I learnt how to have a critical mind to analyze [the reliability of] data”; another wrote “we have to carefully study the data to evaluate its reliability, coverage and sources.” Many specified the understanding that socioeconomic data had no absolute accuracy similar to scientific data.

As expected, some students received the session better than others, and some engaged themselves in the activities more than others. Generally, the teaching objectives were achieved; however, additional time for instruction would have been beneficial. The instructor had to halt discussion because of time limitations, and could not allocate any time for hands-on searching in section 8, in which databases were introduced. The teaching objectives would have been better achieved in a ninety-minute session. In active learning, students need more time to discuss and to think.

Perkins explains the three stages of learning process as acquiring skills, making the skills automatic, and transferring the skills to other contexts of application.¹⁶ To facilitate the intellectual development of students, the intervention should provide for all three stages. In the class for socioeconomic data, students acquired the conceptual skills and knowledge of data collection, use, and seeking. Practices in finding a variety of data from different sources would have helped make the skills automatic. The instruction could have used such practices in class if time allowed, or in the form of after class assignments. To facilitate transfer, the course project could encourage or require the use of socioeconomic data. Moreover, if students could apply the skills in other courses during the same or subsequent semesters, then they would have better opportunities to consolidate further skills transfer.