1. The term development refers to how people grow, adapt, and change over the course of their lifetimes, through physical development, personality development, socioemotional development, cognitive development (thinking), and language development. This chapter presents five major theories of human development that are widely accepted: Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive and moral development, Lev Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development, Erik Erikson's theory of personal and social development, and Lawrence Kohlberg's theories of moral development.
2. Aspects of development
   1. Children are not miniature adults. They think differently, they see the world differently, and they live by different moral and ethical principles than adults do.
   2. One of the first requirements of effective teaching is that the teacher under stands how students think and how they view the world. Effective teaching strategies must take into account students' ages and stages of development.

1. Nature-nurture controversy: Is development predetermined at birth, by hereditary factors, or do experience and other environmental factors affect it? Today, most developmental psychologists believe that nature and nurture combine to influence biological factors playing a stronger role in some aspects, such as physical development, and environmental factors playing a stronger role in others, such as moral development.
   
   
2. Continuous and discontinuous theories. A second issue revolves around the notion of how change occurs. One perspective assumes that development occurs in a smooth progression as skills develop and parents and the environment provide experiences. This continuous theory of development would suggest that at children are capable of thinking and acting like adults, given the proper experience and education.
   
   
3. A second perspective assumes that children progress through a set of predictable and invariant stages of development. In this case, change can be fairly abrupt as children advance to a new stage of development All children are believed to acquire skills in the same sequence, although rates of progress differ from child to child. The abilities that children gain in each subsequent stage are not simply "more of the same"; at each stage, children develop qualitatively different understandings, abilities and beliefs. Skipping stages is impossible, although at any given time a child may exhibit behaviors characteristic of more than one stage 1998). In contrast to continuous theories, these discontinuous theories of development focus on inborn factors rather than environmental influences to explain change over time.
   
   
4. Today, most developmentalists acknowledge the role of both inborn factors and social experiences when explaining children's behavior. Vygotsky's theories in particular rely on social interactions as well as predictable stages of growth to explain development.
   
   
5. Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
   1. Jean Piaget, born in Switzerland in 1896, is the most influential developmental psychologist in the history of psychology. After receiving his doctorate in biology, he became more interested in psychology, basing his earliest theories on careful observation of his own three children. Piaget thought of himself as applying biological principles and methods to the study of human development, and many of the terms he introduced to psychology were drawn directly from biology.
   2. Piaget explored both why and how mental abilities change over time. His explanation of developmental change assumes that the child is an active organism. For Piaget, development depends in large part on the child's manipulation of and active interaction with the environment. Piaget's theory of cognitive development proposes that a child's intellect, or cognitive abilities, progresses through four distinct stages. The emergence of new abilities and ways of processing information characterize each stage.
   3. How development occurs
      1. Piaget believed that all children are born with an innate tendency to interact with and make sense of their environments. He referred to the basic ways of organizing and processing information as cognitive structures. Young children demonstrate patterns of behavior or thinking, called schemes, which older children and adults also use in dealing with objects in the world. We use schemes to find out about and act in the world; each scheme treats all objects and events in the same way. For example, most young infants will discover that one thing you can do with objects is bang them. When they do this, the object makes a noise, and they see the object hitting a surface. Their observations tell them something about the object. Babies also learn about objects by biting them, sucking on them, and throwing them. Each of these approaches to interacting with objects is a scheme. When babies encounter a new object, how are they to know what this object is all about? According to Piaget, they will use the schemes they have developed and will find out whether the object makes a loud or soft sound when banged, what it tastes like, whether it gives milk, and maybe whether it rolls or just goes thud when dropped.
      2. According to Piaget, adaptation is the process of adjusting schemes in response to the environment by means of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the process of understanding a new object or event in terms of an existing scheme. If you give young infants small objects that they have never seen before but that resemble familiar objects, they are likely to grasp them, bite them, and bang them. In other words, they will try to use existing schemes to learn about these unknown things. Similarly, a high school student may have a studying scheme that involves putting information on cards and memorizing the cards' contents. She may then try to apply this scheme to learn difficult concepts such as economics, for which this approach may not be effective.
      3. Sometimes, when old ways of dealing with the world simply don't work, a child might modify an existing scheme in light of new information or a new experience, a process called accommodation. For example, if you give an egg to a baby who has a banging scheme for small objects, what will happen to the egg is obvious. Less obvious, however, is what will happen to the baby's banging scheme. Because of the unexpected consequences of banging the egg, the baby might change the scheme. In the future the baby might bang some objects hard and others softly. The high school student who studies only by means of memorization might learn to use a different strategy to study economics, such as discussing difficult concepts with a friend.
      4. The baby who banged the egg and the student who tried to memorize rather than comprehend had to deal with situations that could not be fully handled by existing schemes. This, in Piaget's theory, creates a state of disequilibrium, or an imbalance between what is understood and what is encountered. People naturally try to reduce such imbalances by focusing on the stimuli that cause the disequilibrium and developing new schemes or adapting old ones until equilibrium is restored. This process of restoring balance is called equilibration. According to Piaget, learning depends on this process. When equilibrium is upset, children have the opportunity to grow and develop. Eventually, qualitatively new ways of thinking about the world emerge, and children advance to a new stage of development. Piaget believed that physical experiences and manipulation of the environment are critical for developmental change to occur.
   4. Piaget's theory of development represents constructivism, a view of cognitive development as a process in which children actively build systems of meaning and understandings of reality through their experiences and interactions. In this view, children actively construct knowledge by continually assimilating and accommodating new information.
   5. Piaget divided the cognitive development of children and adolescents into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. He believed that all children pass through these stages in this order and that no child can skip a stage, although different children pass through the stages at somewhat different rates.
      1. The earliest stage (birth to age 2) is called sensorimotor, because during this stage babies and young children explore their world by using their senses and their motor skills. Piaget believed that all children are born with an innate tendency to interact with and make sense of their environments. Dramatic changes occur as infants progress through the sensorimotor period. Initially, all infants have inborn behavior called reflexes.
         1. Infants soon learn to use these reflexes to produce more interesting and intentional patterns of behavior. This learning occurs initially through accident and then through more intentional trial-and-error efforts.
         2. According to Piaget, by the end of the sensorimotor stage, children have progressed from their earlier trial-and-error approach to a more planned approach to problem solving. For the first time they can mentally represent objects and events. What most of us would call "thinking" appears now. This is a major advance, because it means that the child can think through and plan behavior.
         3. For example, suppose a 2-year-old is in the kitchen watching his mother prepare dinner. If the child knows where the step stool is kept, he may ask to have it set up to afford a better view of the counter and a better chance for a nibble. The child did not stumble on to this solution accidentally. Instead, he thought about the problem, figured out a possible solution that used the step stool, tried out the solution mentally, and only then tried the solution in practice.
      2. Another hallmark of the sensorimotor period is the development of a grasp of object permanence. Piaget argued that children must learn that objects are physically stable and exist even when the objects are not in the child's physical presence. For example, if you cover an infant's bottle with a towel, the child may not remove it, believing that the bottle is gone. By 2 years of age, children understand that objects exist even if they cannot be seen. When children develop this notion of object permanence, they have taken a step toward more advanced thinking. Once they realize that things exist out of sight, they can start using symbols to represent these things in their minds so that they can think about them.
      3. The preoperational stage (ages 2-7). Whereas infants can learn about and understand the world only by physically manipulating objects, preschoolers have greater ability to think about things and can use symbols to mentally represent objects. During the preoperational stage, children's language and concepts develop at an incredible rate. Yet much of their thinking remains surprisingly primitive.
         1. One of Piaget's earliest and most important discoveries was that young children lacked an understanding of the principle of conservation. For example, if you pour milk from a tall, narrow container into a shallow, wide one in the presence of a preoperational child, the child will firmly believe that the tall glass has more milk.
         2. The child focuses on only one aspect (the height of the milk), ignoring all others, and cannot be convinced that the amount of milk is the same. Similarly, a preoperational child is likely to believe that a sandwich cut in four pieces is more sandwich or that a line of blocks that is spread out contains more blocks than a line that is compressed, even after being shown that the number of blocks is identical.
         3. Several aspects of preoperational thinking help to explain the error on conservation tasks. One characteristic is centration: paying attention to only one aspect of a situation.
         4. Preschoolers' thinking can also be characterized as being irreversible. Reversibility is a very important aspect of thinking, according to Piaget; it simply means the ability to change direction in one's thinking so that one can return to a starting point. If preoperational children could think this way, hen they could mentally reverse the process of pouring the milk and realize that if he milk were poured back into the tall beaker, its quantity would not change.
         5. Another characteristic of the preoperational child's thinking is its focus on states. In the milk problem the milk was poured from one container to another. Preschoolers ignore this pouring process and focus only on the beginning state (milk in a tall glass) and end state (milk in a shallow dish). It is as though the child was viewing a series of still pictures instead of the movie that the adult sees.
         6. Finally, preoperational children are egocentric in their thinking. Children at this stage believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do. Preoperational children also interpret events entirely in reference to themselves.
      4. Concrete operational stage (ages 7-11) Although the differences between the mental abilities of preoperational preschoolers and concrete operational elementary school students are dramatic, concrete operational children still do not think like adults. They are very much rooted in the world as it is and have difficulty with abstract thought.
         1. The child at this stage can form concepts, see relationships, and solve problems, but only as long as they involve objects and situations that are familiar.
         2. During the elementary school years, children's cognitive abilities undergo dramatic changes. Elementary school children no longer have difficulties with conservation problems, because they have acquired the concept of reversibility.
         3. Another fundamental difference between preoperational and concrete operational children is that the younger child, who is in the preoperational stage, responds to perceived appearances, whereas the older, concrete operational child responds to inferred reality.
         4. One important task that children learn during the concrete operational stage is seriation, or arranging things in a logical progression; for example, lining up sticks from smallest to largest. To do this, they must be able to order or classify objects according to some criterion or dimension, in this case length. Once this ability is acquired, children can master a related skill known as transitivity, the ability to infer a relationship between two objects on the basis of knowledge of their respective relationships with a third object.
         5. A final ability that children acquire during the concrete operational stage is class inclusion, the ability to form classes and compare the differences between them.
      5. Formal operational stage (age 11 to adulthood). With the onset of puberty, children's thinking begins to develop into the form that is characteristic of adults. The preadolescent begins to be able to think abstractly and to see possibilities beyond the here and now. These abilities continue to develop into adulthood. With the formal operational stage comes the ability to deal with potential or hypothetical situations; the form is now separate from the content. Adolescents can monitor, or think about, their own thinking.
         1. Generating abstract relationships from available information and then comparing those abstract relationships to each other is a general skill underlying many tasks in which adolescents' competence leaps forward. For example, asked to explain the proverb "Don't cry over spilled milk," a child might explain that once milk is spilled, there's nothing to cry about but might not see that the proverb has a broader meaning. Adolescents and adults have little difficulty with this type of task.
         2. Another ability that Piaget and others recognized in the young adolescent is the ability to hypothesize- to reason about situations and conditions that have not been experienced. The adolescent can accept, for the sake of argument or discussion, conditions that are arbitrary, that are not known to exist, or even that are known to be contrary to fact.
         3. The thinking characteristic of the formal operations stage usually appears between ages 11 and 15, but there are many individuals who never reach this stage. Individuals tend to use formal operational thinking in some situations and not others, and this remains true into adulthood. There is also some evidence that formal operational thinking does not appear at all in some non-Western cultures.
         4. According to Piaget, the formal operational stage brings cognitive development to a close. For Piaget, what began as a set of inborn reflexes has developed into the system of cognitive structures that makes human thought what it is. However, intellectual growth may continue to take place beyond adolescence. According to Piaget, the foundation has been laid, and no new structures need to develop; all that is needed is the addition of knowledge and the development of more complex schemes.
   6. Criticisms and revisions of Piaget's theory
      1. One important Piagetian principle is that development precedes learning. Piaget held that developmental stages were largely fixed and that such concepts as conservation could not be taught. However, research has established some cases in which Piagetian tasks can be taught to children at earlier developmental stages.
      2. Similar kinds of research have also led to a reassessment of children's egocentricity. In simple, practical contexts, children demonstrated their ability to consider the point of view of others. In addition, infants have been shown to demonstrate aspects of object permanence much earlier than Piaget predicted.
      3. The result of this research has been recognition that children are more competent than Piaget originally thought, especially when their practical knowledge is being assessed. Gelman (1979) suggests that the cognitive abilities of preschoolers are more fragile than those of older children and therefore are evident only under certain conditions.
      4. Another area in which Piaget's work has been criticized in recent years goes to the heart of his "stage" theory. Many researchers now doubt that there are broad stages of development affecting all types of cognitive tasks; instead, they argue that children's skills develop in different ways on different tasks and that their experience (including direct teaching in school or elsewhere) can have a strong influence on the pace of development.
   
   
   
6. Neo-Piagetian and information-processing views of development
   1. Neo-Piagetian theories are recent modifications of Piaget's theory that attempt to overcome the theory's limitations and address problems its critics have identified. In particular, neo-Piagetians have demonstrated that children's abilities to operate at a particular stage depend a great deal on the specific tasks involved; that training and experience, including social interactions, can accelerate children's development; and that culture has an important impact on development.
   2. R. Case (1998), who believes, as did Piaget, that children progress through developmental stages, proposes one example of neo-Piagetian work on cognitive development. These stages reflect the kinds of mental representations children can form and how information is processed. The stages proposed by Case are different from those described by Piaget in that ways of processing information become more complex but not necessarily different. Unlike Piaget, Case believes developmental change is based on a child's capacity to process and remember information. According to Case, short-term memory capacity not only increases with physical maturity of the brain but also becomes more efficient with practice and instruction.
   3. Alternatives to Piagetian views of stages of cognitive development include information-processing approaches, based on the idea that people process information in a way similar to computers. Information-processing theorists tend to agree with Piaget's description of cognition but, unlike Piaget, believe that thinking skills can be directly taught. Siegler (1998) observes, for example, that children acquire increasingly powerful rules or procedures for solving problems and can be stimulated to discover deficiencies in their own logic and to apply new logical principles. In other words, they can discern rules and assess their application.
   
   
   
7. How did Vygotsky view cognitive development?
   1. Lev Semionovich Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who, though a contemporary of Piaget, died in 1934. His work was not widely read in English until the 1970s, however, and only since then have his theories become influential in North America. Vygotskian theory is now a powerful force in developmental psychology, and many of the critiques he made of the Piagetian perspective more than 60 years ago have come to the fore today.
   2. Vygotsky's work is based on two key ideas. First, he proposed that intellectual development can be understood only in terms of the historical and cultural contexts children experience. Second, he believed that development depends on the sign systems that individuals grow up with: the symbols that cultures create to help people think, communicate, and solve problems-for example, a culture's language, writing system, or counting system.
   3. In contrast to Piaget, Vygotsky proposed that cognitive development is strongly linked to input from others. Like Piaget, however, Vygotsky believed that the acquisition of sign systems occurs in an invariant sequence of steps that is the same for all children.
   4. Recall that Piaget's theory suggests that development precedes learning. In other words, specific cognitive structures need to develop before certain types of learning can take place. Vygotsky's theory suggests that learning precedes development. For Vygotsky, learning involves the acquisition of signs by means of instruction and information from others. Development involves the child's internalizing these signs so as to be able to think and solve problems without the help of others. This ability is called self-regulation.
      1. The first step in the development of self-regulation and independent thinking is learning that actions and sounds have a meaning.
      2. The second step in developing internal structures and self-regulation involves practice.
      3. The final step involves using signs to think and solve problems without the help of others. At this point, children become self-regulating, and the sign system has become internalized.
   5. Private speech is a mechanism that Vygotsky emphasized for turning shared knowledge into personal knowledge. Vygotsky proposed that children incorporate the speech of others and then use that speech to help themselves solve problems. Private speech is easy to see in young children, who frequently talk to themselves, especially when faced with difficult tasks.
   6. The zone of proximal development - Vygotsky's theory implies that cognitive development and the ability to use thought to control our own actions require first mastering cultural communication systems and then learning to use these systems to regulate our own thought processes. The most important contribution of Vygotsky's theory is an emphasis on the sociocultural nature of learning.
      1. He believed that learning takes place when children are working within their zone of proximal development.
      2. That is, the zone of proximal development describes tasks that a child has not yet learned but is capable of learning at a given time. Some educators refer to a "teacher moment" when a child or group of children is exactly at the point of readiness for a given concept.
   7. A key idea derived from Vygotsky's notion of social learning is that of scaffolding: the assistance provided by more competent peers or adults. Typically, scaffolding means providing a child with a great deal of support during the early stages of learning. A related concept is the cognitive apprenticeship.
   8. Vygotsky's theories of education have two major implications. One is the desirability of setting up cooperative learning arrangements among groups of students with differing levels of ability. Tutoring by more competent peers would be most effective in promoting growth within the zone of proximal development. Second, a Vygotskian approach to instruction emphasizes students taking more and more responsibility for their own learning.
   
   
   
8. How did Erikson view personal and social development?
   1. Like cognitive development, personal and social development is often described in terms of stages. Like Piaget, Erikson had no formal training in psychology, but as a young man he was trained by Freud as a psychoanalyst Erikson hypothesized that people pass through eight psychosocial stages in their lifetimes. At each stage, there are crises or critical issues to be resolved. Most people resolve each psychosocial crisis satisfactorily and put it behind them to take on new challenges, but some people do not completely resolve these crises and must continue to deal with them later in life.
      1. STAGE I: TRUST VERSUS MISTRUST (BIRTH TO 18 MONTHS) The goal of infancy is to develop a basic trust in the world. Erikson (1968, p. 96) defined basic trust as "an essential trustfulness of others as well as a fundamental sense of one's own trustworthiness." This crisis has a dual nature; Infants not only have their needs met, but they also help in meeting the mother's needs. The mother, or maternal figure, is usually the first important person in the child's world. She is the one who must satisfy the infant's need for food and affection. If the mother is inconsistent or rejecting, she becomes a source of frustration for the infant rather than a source of pleasure. The mother's behavior creates in the infant a sense of mistrust for his or her world that may persist throughout childhood and into adulthood.
      2. STAGE II: AUTONOMY VERSUS DOUBT (18 MONTHS TO 3 YEARS) By the age of 2, most babies can walk and have learned enough about language to communicate with other people. Children in the "terrible twos" no longer want to depend totally on others. Instead, they strive toward autonomy, the ability to do things for themselves. The child's desires for power and independence often clash with the desires of the parent. Erikson believes that children at this stage have the dual desire to hold on and to let go.
      3. STAGE III: INITIATIVE VERSUS GUILT (3 TO 6 YEARS) During this period, children's continually maturing motor and language skills permit them to be increasingly aggressive and vigorous in the exploration of both their social and their physical environment. Three-year-olds have a growing sense of initiative, which can be encouraged by parents, other family members, and other caregivers who permit children to run, jump, play, slide, and throw. "Being firmly convinced that he is a person on his own, the child must now find out what kind of person he may become" (Erikson, 1968, p. 115).
      4. STAGE IV: INDUSTRY VERSUS INFERIORITY (6 TO 12 YEARS) Entry into school brings with it a huge expansion in the child's social world. Teachers and peers take on increasing importance for the child, while the influence of parents decreases. Children now want to make things. Success brings with it a sense of industry, a good feeling about oneself and one's abilities. Failure creates a negative self-image, a sense of inadequacy that may hinder future learning. And "failure" need not be real; it may be merely an inability to measure up to one's own standards or those of parents, teachers, or brothers and sisters.
      5. STAGE V: IDENTITY VERSUS ROLE CONFUSION (12 TO 18 YEARS) The question "Who am I?" becomes important during adolescence. To answer it, adolescents increasingly turn away from parents and toward peer groups. Erikson believed that during adolescence the individual's rapidly changing physiology, coupled with pressures to make decisions about future education and career, creates the need to question and redefine the psychosocial identity established during the earlier stages.
      6. STAGE VI: INTIMACY VERSUS ISOLATION (YOUNG ADULTHOOD) Once young people know who they are and where they are going, the stage is set for the sharing of their life with another. The young adult is now ready to form a new relationship of trust and intimacy with another individual, a "partner in friendship, sex, competition, and cooperation." This relationship should enhance the identity of both partners without stifling the growth of either. The young adult who does not seek out such intimacy or whose repeated tries fail may retreat into isolation.
      7. STAGE VII: GENERATIVITY VERSUS SELF-ABSORPTION (MIDDLE ADULTHOOD) Generativity is "the interest in establishing and guiding the next generation" (Erikson, 1980). Typically, people attain generatively through raising their own children. However, the crisis of this stage can also be successfully resolved through other forms of productivity and creativity, such as teaching. During this stage, people should continue to grow; if they don't, a sense of "stagnation and interpersonal impoverishment" develops, leading to self-absorption or self-indulgence (Erikson, 1980).
      8. STAGE VIII: INTEGRITY VERSUS DESPAIR (LATE ADULTHOOD) In the final stage of psychosocial development, people look back over their lifetime and resolve their final identity crisis. Acceptance of accomplishments, failures, and ultimate limitations brings with it a sense of integrity, or wholeness; a realization that one's life has been one's own responsibility. The finality of death must also be faced and accepted.
   2. Implications and criticisms of Erikson's theory
      1. As with Piaget's stages, not all people experience Erikson's crises to the same degree or at the same time. The age ranges stated here may represent the best times for a crisis to be resolved, but they are not the only possible times. For example, children who were born into chaotic homes that failed to give them adequate security may develop trust after being adopted or otherwise brought into a more stable environment.
      2. Erikson's theory describes the basic issues that people confront as they go through life. However, his theory has been criticized because it does not explain how or why individuals progress from one stage to another, and because it is difficult to test empirically.
   
   
   
9. Piaget's theory of moral development
   1. Piaget's theory of cognitive development also included a theory about the development of moral reasoning. Piaget believed that cognitive structures and abilities develop first. Cognitive abilities then determine children's abilities to reason about social situations. As with cognitive abilities, Piaget proposed that moral development progresses in predictable stages, in this case from a very egocentric type of moral reasoning to one based on a system of justice based on cooperation and reciprocity.
   2. To understand children's moral reasoning, Piaget spent a great deal of time watching children play marbles and asking them about the rules of the game. The first thing he discovered was that before about the age of 6, children play by their own idiosyncratic rules. Piaget believed that very young children were incapable of interacting in cooperative ways and therefore unable to engage in moral reasoning.
   3. Piaget found that by the age of 6, children acknowledged the existence of rules, though they were inconsistent in following them. Frequently, several children who were supposedly playing the same game were observed to be playing by different sets of rules. Children at this age also had no understanding that game rules are arbitrary and something that a group can decide by itself. Instead, they saw rules as being imposed by some higher authority and unchangeable.
   4. Piaget (1964) labeled the first stage of moral development heteronomous morality; it has also been called the stage of "moral realism" or "morality of constraint." Heteronomous means being subject to rules imposed by others. During this period, young children are consistently faced with parents and other adults telling them what to do and what not to do. Violations of rules are believed to bring automatic punishment. Justice is seen as automatic, and people who are bad will eventually be punished. Piaget also described children at this stage as judging the morality of behavior on the basis of its consequences.
   5. Piaget found that children did not conscientiously use and follow rules until the age of 10 or 12 years, when children are capable of formal operations. At this age, every child playing the game followed the same set of rules. Children understood that the rules existed to give the game direction and to minimize disputes between players. They understood that rules were something that everyone agreed on and that therefore, if everyone agreed to change them, they could be changed. Piaget also observed that children at this age tend to base moral judgments on the intentions of the actor rather than the consequences of the actions. Children often engage in discussions of hypothetical circumstances that might affect rules. This second stage is labeled autonomous morality or "morality of cooperation." It arises as the child's social world expands to include more and more peers. By continually interacting and cooperating with other children, the child's ideas about rules and therefore morality begin to change. Rules are now what we make them to be. Punishment for transgressions is no longer automatic but must be administered with a consideration of the transgressor's intentions and extenuating circumstances.
   6. According to Piaget, children progress from the stage of heteronomous morality to that of autonomous morality with the development of cognitive structures but also because of interactions with equal-status peers.
   7. Research on elements of Piaget's theories generally supports his ideas, with one key exception. Piaget is felt to have underestimated the degree to which even very young children consider intentions in judging behavior. However, the progression from a focus on outcomes to a focus on intentions over the course of development has been documented many times.
   
   
   
10. Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning
    1. Kohlberg's stage theory of moral reasoning is a refinement of Piaget's. Like Piaget, Kohlberg studied how children (and adults) reason about rules that govern their behavior in certain situations. Kohlberg did not study children's game playing, but rather probed for their responses to a series of structured situations or moral dilemmas. Kohlberg proposed that people pass through a series of six stages of moral judgment or reasoning.
    2. He grouped these six stages into three levels: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. These three levels are distinguished by how the child or adult defines what he or she perceives as correct or moral behavior. Like Piaget, Kohlberg was concerned not so much with the direction of the child's answer as with the reasoning behind it.
       1. Stage 1, which is on the preconventional level of morality, is very similar in form and content to Piaget's stage of heteronomous morality. Children simply obey authority figures to avoid being punished.
       2. In Stage 2, children's own needs and desires become important, yet they are aware of the interests of other people. In a concrete sense they weigh the interests of all parties when making moral judgments, but they are still "looking out for number one."
       3. The conventional level of morality begins at Stage 3. Here morality is defined in terms of cooperation with peers, just as it was in Piaget's stage of autonomous morality. This is the stage at which children have an unquestioning belief in the Golden Rule. Because of the decrease in egocentrism that accompanies concrete operations, children are cognitively capable of putting themselves in someone else's shoes. They can consider the feelings of others when making moral decisions. No longer do they simply do what will not get them punished (Stage 1) or what makes them feel good (Stage 2).
       4. At Stage 4, society's rules and laws replace those of the peer group. A desire for social approval no longer determines moral judgments. Laws are followed without question, and breaking the law can never be justified. Most adults are probably at this stage.
       5. Stage 5 signals entrance into the postconventional level of morality. This level of moral reasoning is probably attained by fewer than 25 percent of adults. Here there is a realization that the laws and values of a society are somewhat arbitrary and particular to that society. Laws are seen as necessary to preserve the social order and to ensure the basic right of life and liberty.
       6. In Stage 6, one's ethical principles are self-chosen and based on abstract concepts such as justice and the equality and value of human rights. Laws that violate these principles can and should be disobeyed because "justice is above the law." Later, Kohlberg (1978, 1984) speculated that Stage 6 is not really separate from Stage 5 and suggested that the two be combined.
       7. Kohlberg (1969) believed that moral dilemmas could be used to advance a child's level of moral reasoning, but only one stage at a time. He theorized that the way in which children progress from one stage to the next is by interacting with others whose reasoning is one or, at most, two stages above their own. The implication for teaching is that teachers must first try to determine children's approximate stage of moral reasoning. They can do this by presenting the children with a dilemma, like the Heinz dilemma referred to in the text. Once a child's level of reasoning is established, other moral dilemmas can be discussed, and the teacher can challenge the child's reasoning with explanations from the next higher stage.
    3. Criticisms of Kohlberg's theory
       1. One criticism is that Kohlberg's work was done with boys, and not girls. Gilligan (1982) has argued that males and females use different moral criteria: that male moral reasoning is focused on people's individual rights, whereas female moral reasoning is focused more on individuals' responsibilities for other people. This is why, she argues, females tend to suggest altruism and self-sacrifice rather than rights and rules as solutions to moral dilemmas.
       2. Another criticism of both Piaget's and Kohlberg's work is that young children can often reason about moral situations in more sophisticated ways than the stage theory would suggest.
       3. The most important limitation of Kohlberg's theory is that it deals with moral reasoning rather than with actual behavior. Many individuals at different stages behave in the same way, and individuals at the same stage often behave in different ways.

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