ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the book, starting with its purposes and the authors’ motivations to write it. It argues that characteristics of both college students and their educational contexts play key roles in students’ development and in whether they achieve their goals and develop the skills associated with complex learning outcomes. This chapter describes a central focus of the book, how people become increasingly able to make complex judgments about their experiences and transform their meaning making as described by self-evolution theory. This theory is introduced, along with the underlying assumptions about human development on which developmental theories are based. This is followed by an overview of the self-evolution research base and critiques of the theory. Later chapters of this book report data from over 900 interviews with college students, and this chapter introduces the source of these data, the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNS), a large, longitudinal, multi-institutional study.
