How We Chose Five Phases for All Goals

The five phases are fixed for this site, but users should consider them helpful rather than definitive. The five phases represent six levels of complexity when the zero level is ignorning the goal. The terms used evolved over a fifteen-year appeared that included the following types of evidence:

  1. Feedback from 350 developmental interviews of experts in more than a 100 domains. Approximately 240 of these interviews were conducted at three institutions: Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), and Virginia Wesleyan University (VWC). Sixteen colleagues learned to conduct developmental interview as part of the Knowledge Development Task Force of the Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education. Several others did so through individual consultation. Every expert has been able to distinguish levels of complexity in their expertise.

  2. Programs that published their use of the five phases for evaluating student progress and designing curriculum include Soundscapes.org, the SCAD programs of Architecture, Interactive Design and Game Development, Foundations, and Industrial Design Departments, and the HUC-JIR program in Rabbinics.

  3. Professional reliable ratings were published for children’s drawing (1200 samples ages 4 to 19), children’s writing (2000 samples ages 6 to 18), developmental research articles (900 ratings of randomly selected articles published between 1930 and 1992), and children’s musical performance (2,500 ratings of children 6-15).