UC Irvine

The value of higher education, and particularly the four-year undergraduate venture influenced from the liberal arts tradition, is largely framed around the impact it has on a broad range of skills and dispositions that serve to enhance human flourishing. Employers and society more broadly can benefit from individuals who are committed to careful thinking, and who are adept in navigating the complex and oft-confused torrent of information presented in everyday life. Among the most discussed attributes are critical thinking, perspective-taking and intellectual virtues, such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and humility. In response, this dissertation investigates undergraduate experiences that lead to the development of such desired qualities. The first chapter introduces and evaluates a pilot intervention to inculcate curiosity in university students, while examining the level of student satisfaction across important subgroups (N = 202). The second chapter, directly building off the first, tests a general theory of moral virtue development as applied to intellectual virtue by testing the mechanisms by which curiosity develops (N = 202). The third chapter examines the longstanding liberal arts notion of course-taking breadth on the formation of complex reasoning skills, situating the research within the adult cognitive development literature (N = 260). Results suggest that these undergraduate experiences are beneficial to the development of higher-order skills, though differences across cognitive outcomes are noticeable. Moreover, the magnitude of development shows promises for potential ways of scaffolding student skills. Lastly, while this research highlighted and was sensitive to issues relating to sound statistical practice (e.g., fitting many models and reporting all tests, employing Bayesian statistics, and directed acyclic graphs), more robust study design features should be implemented in the future.