Ch. 14: Cognitive Development in Adolescence
Gender and moral reasoning
A popular criticism of Kohlberg's theory of moral reasoning arises because his initial research was conducted with all-male samples. Early research that studied both males and females suggested gender differences in moral reasoning, with males typically showing Stage 4 reasoning, characterized by concerns about law and order, and females showing Stage 3 reasoning, characterized by concerns about maintaining relationships.
Social perspective taking
According to Robert Selman, social perspective taking ability follows a developmental path from extreme egocentrism in early childhood to mature perspective taking ability in late adolescence. Similar to Piaget's ideas about cognition, Selman posed that individuals progress through several stages of social perspective taking. Young children are often unable to separate their own perspective from those of others, believing that others hold their views. With advances in cognitive and social development, 6-to 8-year-old children recognize that others have different thoughts but they have difficulty comparing others' perspectives with their own. As children approach adolescence (age 8-10), they appreciate that others have different perspectives and taking others' points of view offers a valuable window to interpreting their behavior. It is not until early adolescence (age 10-12) that individuals develop the abstract thinking needed to realize that other people can take their perspective. That is, adolescents become capable of mutual perspective taking. Research has suggested that perspective taking ability develops from childhood into adolescence, but may not closely follow the age-based timeline advocated by Selman. Perspective taking ability is linked with working memory. Developmental improvements in cognitive control influence social cognitive processing. Advances in social perspective taking permit adolescents to better understand others and also to grasp how they are perceived by others. Perspective taking ability predicts peer relations, friendship, and popularity. Perspective taking abilities and the ability to apply their understanding emerges gradually. Teenagers are prone to errors in reasoning and lapses in judgment, as evidenced by the emergence of adolescent egocentrism.
Stage-environment fit
According to researcher Jacqueline Eccles, negative effects of school transitions occur when there is little stage-environment fit. That is, adolescents experience difficulties when there is a poor match between their developmental needs and when the school environment affords in its organization and characteristics.
Personal fable
Adolescents preoccupation with themselves also leads them to believe that they are special, unique, and invulnerable-a belief known as the personal fable. They believe that their emotions, the highs of happiness and depths of despair that they feel, are different from and more intense than other people's emotions and that others simply do not understand. The invulnerability aspect of the personal fable may predispose adolescents to seek risks and may lead them to believe that they are immune to the negative consequences of such risky activities such as drug use, delinquency, and unsafe sex.
Adolescent moral development
Adolescents' newfound abilities for abstract reasoning lead them to approach problems in different ways, consider multiple perspectives, and delight in the process of thinking itself. It is these cognitive advances that enable adolescents to demonstrate the final and most sophisticated form of reasoning described in Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral reasoning: Postconventional moral reasoning.
Developmental impact of attending college
Adults of all ages often view their college years as highly influential in shaping their thoughts, values, and worldview. In addition to academic learning, college presents young people with various perspectives and encourages experimentation with alternative behavior, beliefs, and values. College students encounter a wealth of new experiences and opportunities for autonomy, ideas, and social demands. College courses often require students to construct arguments and solve complex problems, fostering the development of post-formal reasoning. Attending college is associated with advanced moral reasoning and the ability to synthesize the considerations of autonomy and individual rights with promotion of human welfare. In addition to intellectual growth, college students show advances in social development. Education that challenges students and encourages them to consider perspectives other than their own, solve ambiguous, messy problems, and apply course work to real-world problems and activities with the affective complexity, which underlies adaptive functioning in college as well as all of the contexts in which young adults are embedded.
Decision making
Advances in cognition permit adolescents to engage in more sophisticated thinking than ever before an approach decision making in more sophisticated ways than children. Under laboratory conditions, adolescents are capable of demonstrating rational decision making that is in line with their goals and is comparable to that of adults. Everyday decisions have personal relevance, require quick thinking, are emotional, and often are made in the presence and influence of others. Adolescents are more approach oriented to positive consequences and less responsive to negative consequences than are adults. Adolescents tend to place more importance on the potential benefits of decisions than on the potential costs or risks. In the presence of rewards, adolescents show heightened activity in the brain systems that support reward processing and reduced activity in the areas responsible for inhibitory control, compared with adults. Risky activity is thought to decline in late adolescence in part because of increases in adolescents' self-regulatory capacities and their capacities for long-term planning that accompany maturation of the frontal cortex.
Social cognition
Advances in reasoning and metacognition lead adolescents to understand themselves and others in more complex ways. Their growing appreciation for other people's perspectives leads to more mature relationships with parents and peers.
Evaluating formal operational reasoning
Although Piaget believed that cognitive development is a universal process, individuals show varying abilities. For example, most adolescents and many adults do not display formal operational thinking in Piagetian hypothetical-deductive tasks. Does this mean that they cannot think abstractly? Likely not. Piaget explained that opportunities to use formal operational reasoning influence its development. Individuals are more likely to show formal operational reasoning when considering material with which they have a great deal of experience. Ultimately, the appearance of formal operational reasoning varies across individuals as well as within individuals because it is not consistent across intellectual areas. Instead, the appearance of formal operations varies with situation, task, context, and the individuals motivation. Formal operational reasoning does not suddenly appear in early adolescence. Instead, cognitive change occurs gradually from childhood on, with gains in knowledge, experience, and information processing capacity. Most developmental scientists believe that the pinnacle of cognitive development is not in adolescence. Most agree that cognitive development continues throughout adulthood.
Perspective taking
Although children are largely unable to take another person's perspective, perspective taking ability improves alongside cognitive and social development. By adolescence, young people have lots of social experience and their reasoning skills makes them much better able to understand different viewpoints, which has implications for social relationships.
Noncollege-bound youth
Although most young people express the desire to go to college, a 2017 report showed that only 34% of adults held college degrees by age 25. Each year, about one-third of high school graduates in the U.S. transition from high school to work without attending college.
Schools and academic functioning in adolescence
Apart from the home context, school is the most relevant and immediate context in which adolescents live. Most adolescents transition from an elementary school to a middle school (typically, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades) or junior high school (seventh, eighth, and ninth grades) and then to a high school (ninth through twelfth grades).
Adolescent egocentrism
As adolescents get better at reasoning and metacognition, they often direct their abstract thinking abilities toward themselves. Although social perspective taking improves, it often develops slowly and even in a piecemeal fashion. When it comes to considering themselves, adolescents often have difficulty separating their own and others' perspectives. That is, adolescents find it difficult to distinguish their view of what others think of them from reality, what others actually think about them. They show adolescent egocentrism, a perspective taking error that is manifested in two phenomena: the imaginary and the personal fable. Both the imaginary audience and the personal fable are thought to increase in early adolescence, peak in middle adolescence, and decline in late adolescence. Recent research suggests that adolescent egocentrism may persist into late adolescence and beyond.
Cognitive development
As in infancy and childhood, cognitive-developmental theory and information processing theory offer different explanations and accounts of cognitive development in adolescence.
College-bound youths
Attending college, at least for a time, has become a normative experience for emerging adults. In 2015, 69% of high school graduates in the U.S. enrolled in 2- or 4-year colleges. Students enroll in college to learn about a specific field of study and to prepare for careers, but attending college is also associated with many positive developmental outcomes.
Societal perspective taking
By middle adolescence (age 12-15), societal perspective taking emerges and adolescents recognize that the social environment, including the larger society, influences people's perspectives and beliefs.
Care orientation
Characterized by empathy, a desire to maintain relationships and a responsibility no to cause harm.
Parenting and academic competence
Close parent-adolescent relationships serve as an important buffer to academic motivation and performance from childhood through adolescence for young people at all socioeconomic levels. As in other areas of development, both the overly harsh parenting characterized by the authoritarian parenting style and the lax, permissive parenting style are associated with poor academic performance. Likewise, adolescents reared by uninvolved parents tend to show the poorest school grades. Authoritative parenting, in contrast, is associated with academic achievement in adolescents around the world, including Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Iran, Pakistan, Scotland, and the U.S. When parents use the authoritative style, they are open to discussion, involve their adolescents in joint decision making, and firmly but fairly monitor their adolescents' behavior and set limits. This style of parenting helps adolescents feel valued, respected, and encouraged to think for themselves. Just as in elementary school, parents can promote high academic achievement in middle and high school students by being active and involved. Parent-school involvement in eighth grade has been shown to predict tenth-grade students' grade point average regardless of socioeconomic status, previous academic achievement, and ethnicity. By being involved in the school, parents communicate the importance of education; they also model academic engagement and problem solving, which can help protect against dropout.
Cultural and moral reasoning
Cross-cultural studies of Kohlberg's theory show that the sequence appears in all cultures but that people in non-Western cultures rarely score above Stage 3. Like cognitive capacities, morality and appropriate responses to ethical dilemmas are defined by each society and its cultural perspectives. Whereas Western cultures tend to emphasize the rights of individual (justice-based reasoning), non-Western cultures tend to value collectivism, focusing on human interdependence (care-based reasoning). Individuals in collectivist cultures tend to define moral dilemmas in terms of the responsibility to the entire community rather than simply to the individual. Such emphasis on the needs of others is characteristic of Stage 3 in Kohlberg's scheme. However, because moral values are relative to the cultural context, Stage 3 reasoning is an advanced form of reasoning in collectivist cultures, because it embodies what is most valued in these cultures, concepts such as interdependence and relationships. Despite cross-cultural differences, individuals in many cultures show similarities in reasoning. It appears that the development of moral reasoning progresses in a similar pattern across cultures. People of different cultures are able to reason using both care and justice orientations even though cultures tend to vary in the weight they assign moral orientations, emphasizing one over another.
Transition to college
Despite these benefits, however, many students do not complete college. Only about two-thirds of students who enroll in 4-year institutions graduate within 6 years, and one-third of students enrolled at 2-year institutions graduate within 3 years. Students who are the first in their families to attend college (known as first-generation college students), as well as those who are of color of from low SES homes (who are also often first-generation students), tend to experience the most difficulty transitioning to college and are at highest risk of dropping out or attending discontinuously. Students' transition to college and success in college are also influenced by the college environment. Institutions that are responsive to the academic, social, and cultural needs of students help them adjust to college and, ultimately, succeed.
Formal operational reasoning
Entails the ability to think abstractly, logically, and systematically. Children in the concrete operational stage reason about specific things-that is, concepts that exist in reality, such as problems concerning how to equitably divide materials.
Postsecondary education and employment
From an early age most children are asked by well-meaning adults, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Do you remember your answer to this question? Did it change over time? Many adolescents have their first experiences with paid work during high school.
Information Processing Theory
From the perspective of information processing theory, improvements in information processing capacities-such as attention, memory, knowledge base, and speed-enable adolescents to think faster, more efficiently, and more complexly than ever before. Specifically, brain development influences adolescents' growing capacities for executive function, permitting greater cognitive control, and regulation of attention, thinking, and problem solving.
Attention
Greater control over attention allows adolescents to deploy it selectively. As compared with children, adolescents show improvements in selective attention, focusing on one stimulus while tuning out others and remaining focused even as task demands change, as well as divided attention, attending to two stimuli at once. With increase in attention, adolescents are better able to hold material in working memory while taking in and processing new material. Improvements in the ability to monitor information and select the most important parts of it have important implications for classroom performance. Now students can concentrate on more complex tasks. Advances in information processing support adolescents' abilities to solve geometry problems, employ the scientific method, and solve other complex problems.
Justice orientation
Male mode of moral reasoning. Based on the abstract principles of fairness and individualism captured by Kohlberg. Care and justice represent frameworks modified by experience that influence how people interpret and resolve moral problems.
Social interaction and moral reasoning
Moral development occurs within parent, peer, and school contexts and is influenced by social development. Social interactions offer important opportunities for the development of moral reasoning. High-quality parent-child relationships predict advanced moral reasoning. Reasoning advances when adolescents have opportunities to engage in discussions that are characterized by mutual perspective taking. Engaging adolescents in discussion about personal experiences, local issues, and media events-while presenting alternative points of view and asking questions-advances reasoning. Parents who engage their children in discussion, listen with sensitivity, ask for children's input, praise them, engage them with questioning, and use humor promote the development of moral reasoning. Likewise, interactions with peers in which adolescents confront one another with differing perspectives and engage each other with in-depth discussions promote the development of moral reasoning. Adolescents who report having more close friendships in which they engage in deep conversations tend to show more advanced moral reasoning than do teens who have little social contact. They also report feeling positive emotions when they make unselfish moral decisions. Moral reasoning is inherently social.
Moral reasoning and behavior
Moral reasoning explains how people think about issues of justice, but reasoning is only moderately related to behavior. People often behave in ways they know they should not. With advances in moral reasoning, adolescents often begin to coordinate moral, conventional, and personal concepts and are more likely to act in ways that are in line with their beliefs. Moral reasoning is associated with volunteerism. Although adolescents who show low levels of moral reasoning are thought to be a greater risk for delinquency, and others show no relationship. Adolescents, particularly early adolescents, tend to overwhelmingly label behaviors as personal issues. Adolescents' moral development influences behaviors they label as moral decisions but not those viewed as social conventions or personal issues. Adolescents who engage in delinquency are more likely than other adolescents to view delinquent behaviors as issues of social convention or personal choice rather than moral issues, suggesting that their level of moral maturity may not influence on their delinquent behavior because they do not label the behavior as entailing a moral decision. A variety of factors influence the development of moral reasoning and how adolescents view and behave in their world.
Postconventional moral reasoning
Much of Kohlberg's theory was based on longitudinal research with a group of boys, ages 10, 13, and 16, who were periodically interviewed over 3 decades. Kohlberg discovered that the boys' reasoning progressed through sequential stages and in a predictable order. Kohlberg measured moral reasoning by presenting individuals with hypothetical dilemmas. The Heinz dilemma is the most popular example of the hypothetical conflicts that Kohlberg used to study moral development. These problems examine how people make decisions when fairness and people's rights are pitted against obedience to authority and law. Participants' explanations of how they arrived at their decisions reveal developmental shifts through three broad levels of reasoning that correspond to cognitive development. School-age children's moral decisions tend to be socially driven. Conventional moral reasoning entails internalizing the norms and standards of authority figures, in a desire to be accepted (Stage 3) and to maintain social order (Stage 4). Not until adolescence, according to Kohlberg, do not become capable of demonstrating the most advanced moral thinking, postconventional moral reasoning, which entails autonomous decision making from moral principles that value respect for individual rights above all else. Postconventional moral thinkers recognize that their self-chosen principles of fairness and justice may sometimes conflict with the law. At Stage 5, Social Contract Orientation, individuals view laws and rules as flexible and part of the social contract or agreement meant to further human interests. Laws and rules are to be followed as they bring good to people, but laws can be changed if they are inconsistent with the needs and rights of the majority. Stage 6, Universal Ethical Principles, represents the most advanced moral reasoning, defined by abstract ethical principles that are universal, or valid for all people regardless of law, such as equality and respect for human dignity.
Working memory and executive function
Neurological maturation leads to improvements in working memory throughout adolescence. Working memory reaches adult-like levels by about age 19 and continues to improve into the 20s. Advances in working memory are largely driven by changes in the central executive. Advances in executive function permit individuals to effectively deploy their attention and memory to solve problems. Adolescents become better able to determine what is important to attend to, combine new information with information already in working memory, and select and apply strategies for manipulating the information in order to understand it, make decisions, and solve problems. Adolescents are more likely than children to use memory strategies such as organizing new material into patterns and connecting new material with what is already known. Experience contributes to cognitive advances. Advances in knowledge and strategy use result in more sophisticated, efficient, and quick thinking and learning. Now adolescents can retain more at once, better integrate prior experiences and knowledge with new information, and combine information in more complex ways. Brain development influences adolescents' growing capacities for executive function, permitting greater cognitive control and regulation of attention, thinking, and problem solving. Working memory and executive function improve with maturation and experience, but are also influenced by contextual factors. Socioeconomic status is also associated with executive function. In addition, development of executive function is associated with SES, suggesting that adolescents in low SES homes and neighborhoods may experience greater challenges in developing the cognitive control capacities needed for good decision making. Adolescents from high-income families show greater activation of the prefrontal cortex during working memory tasks than those from low-income families, and prefrontal activity better predicted math achievement in high-income adolescents. Contextual factors can also buffer the negative effects of low SES.
Metacognition
Not only are adolescents better at thinking than children, they are more aware of their own thought process. Adolescents become capable of thinking about ideas and the nature of thinking itself, metacognition. Metacognition refers to knowledge of how the mind works and the ability to control the mind. One study of adolescents and adults found that metacognition ability develops dramatically between ages 11 and 17. As metacognition develops, adolescents become better able to think about how their mind works-how they take in, manipulate, and store information. They can monitor their own thinking. They are better able to understand how they learn and remember and to choose and deploy strategies that enhance the representation, storage, and retrieval of information. Adolescents abilities to apply metacognition in real-world settings continue to develop into late adolescence and early childhood. The ability to think about one's thinking enables adolescents to reason about problems in new ways. By considering their own cognitive strategies and experimenting and reflecting on their experiences, adolescents begin to appreciate logical reasoning, which they increasingly apply to everyday situations. As adolescents become able to reason about reasoning, they show improvements in manipulating abstract ideas and engaging in the hypothetical-deductive thinking that is characteristic of scientific reasoning. The development of metacognition proficiency is associated with gains in academic performance.
Processing speed
One important way in which adolescents' thinking improves is that it gets quicker. Older adolescents are able to process information to solve problems more quickly than younger adolescents, who are quicker than children. Processing speed reaches adult levels in middle to late adolescence, as early as 15. Part of the gains in speed are biological in origin. Changes in the brain underlie many improvement in information processing capacities. As the structure of the prefrontal cortex changes, with decreases in gray matter and increases in white matter, cognition becomes markedly more efficient. Myelination underlies improvements in processing speed during childhood and adolescence, permitting quicker physical and cognitive responses. Compared to children, not only do adolescents show faster reaction speed in gym class, but they are quicker at connecting ideas, making arguments, and drawing conclusions. Processing speed increases and reaches adult levels at about age 15 and is associated with advances in working memory and cognition, especially reasoning. Advances in processing speed are also due to improvements in working memory and long-term memory.
School dropout
School dropout rates in the U.S. have reached historic lows, with dramatic decreases for African American and hispanic adolescents. Nevertheless, each year, about 6% of high school students drop out of school. Students of low socioeconomic status are at high risk of school dropout, and students of color immigrant students are particularly vulnerable. Students with behavior and substance use problems are most at risk for school dropout, but many who drop out simply have academic problems, skip classes with increasing frequency, and disengage emotionally and behaviorally. Lack of parental involvement places students at risk for school dropout-and when parents respond to poor grades with anger and punishment, this can further reduce adolescents' academic motivation and feelings of connectedness to school. Students who are engaged and attached to school and who participate in many school-related activities are less likely to drop out than their less engaged peers. Although dropout is often the result of extended difficulties, there is heterogeneity in paths. Many students show few problems until a particularly disruptive event or situation, such as severe peer victimization, health problems, family instability, or long work hours impairs their coping skills. As adults, high school dropouts experience higher rates of unemployment and, when hired, earn less than high school graduates throughout adulthood.
Hypothetical-deductive reasoning
The ability to consider problems, generate and systematically test hypotheses, and draw conclusions. It is these abilities that underlie the scientific method. The tasks that Piaget constructed to study formal operational reasoning test adolescents' abilities to use scientific reasoning to approach a problem by developing hypotheses and systematically testing them.
Response inhibition
The ability to control and stop responding to a stimulus. The ability to control and inhibit responses advances through childhood but shows substantial gains in adolescence and increases through emerging adulthood. Advances in response inhibition enable adolescents to adapt their responses to the situation. They can inhibit well-learned responses when they are inappropriate to the situation and thereby speed cognitive processing. Response inhibition improves gradually in adolescence. Immature inhibitory processes can contribute to outbursts where it seems as if adolescents speak before considering their feelings. The neurological changes that underlie response inhibition continue to develop into the 20s, and still-immature capacities for response inhibition are thought to underlie the risk-taking behavior common in adolescence.
Automaticity
The amount of cognitive effort required to process the information; as processes become automatic, they require fewer resources and become quicker. Automaticity is a function of experience. Adolescents become more efficient problem solvers as they get better at understanding how their mind works, or metacognition.
Imaginary audience
The imaginary audience is experienced as self-conciousness, feeling as if all eyes are on them. Adolescents misdirect their own preoccupation about themselves toward others and assume that they are the focus of others' attention. In this way, the imaginary audience fuels adolescents' concerns with their appearance and can make the slightest criticism sting painfully, as teens are convinced that all eyes are on them. The imaginary audience contributes to the heightened self-consciousness characteristic of adolescence.
Transition to junior high or middle school and high school
The structure of schools in the U.S. has changed dramatically since the mid-20th century. In past generations, students made only one school transition: from elementary school (kindergarten to grade 8) to high school (grades 9 to 12). Today, students make more school changes, or transitions, than ever before. Middle schools are designed to provide more flexibility and autonomy than elementary schools while encouraging strong ties with adults, such as teachers and parents, as well as offering active learning that takes advantage of and stimulates young adolescents' emerging capacities for abstract reasoning. Change, although often exciting, can cause stress to individuals of all ages. Many students find the transition to a new school, whether middle school or high school, a challenge. Academic motivation and achievement often suffer during school transitions. Many students may feel more lonely and anxious, and they may report depressive symptoms. For most students, these adjustment difficulties are temporary, and their achievement recovers within 1 to 2 years as they adapt to their new schools. However, students who perceive the school transition as more stressful tend to show greater drops in motivation and academic achievement and less connectedness to school that persists well beyond the school transition. School transitions tend to coincide with many developmental and contextual changes. Many young people experience puberty during the transition to middle school. Changing thought capacities, self-perceptions, and relationships, as well as new responsibilities and opportunities for independence, pose challenges. As friendships become more important, school transitions can disrupt them by dividing friends into different schools. All of these simultaneous changes mean that many adolescents experience school transitions as stressful. Some adolescents face greater risks with school transitions than others. Changes in school demographics, particularly a mismatch between the ethnic composition of elementary and middle school, or middle and high school, can pose challenges to adolescents' adjustment. The best student outcomes occur when schools closely match adolescents' developmental needs. Small, tight-knit middle schools may reduce the alienation that some students experience during the middle school transition. Adolescents' success in navigating school transitions is also influenced by their experiences outside of school. Adolescents are most vulnerable to the negative effects of school transitions when they lack the social and emotional resources to cope with multiple stressors. Young people who report feeling supported by their families and having many friends are less bothered by day-to-day stressors and experience school transitions with few problems.
Mutual perspective taking
Understanding that they take other people's points of view at the same time as others attempt to take their own point of view. Now adolescents can consider how their behavior appears to others (take a third person's perspective) and modify their behavior accordingly.
Piaget's Cognitive-Developmental Theory
Views individuals as active constructors of their schemes. Through their interactions with the world, adolescents devise new, more mature schemes and undergo a transformation in thought. The result is formal operational reasoning, the final stage of Piaget's cognitive-developmental theory.
Adolescent employment
Working at a part-time job during high school is commonplace in the U.S. and Canada, with over half of high school students reporting working at some point during the school year. Labor force surveys report fewer employed adolescents (about 30%) than in prior generations, but many of the jobs held by teens are "off the books" and unrecorded. Regardless, adolescent employment today is at its lowest level since World War II. Many U.S. adolescents who work come from middle SES families and seek part-time employment as a source of spending money. Black adolescents are less likely to work than White adolescents. Although both adults and adolescents tend to view working as an opportunity to develop a sense of responsibility, research does not support this view. The effects of employment on adolescent well-being largely depend on the hours worked. About half of employed adolescents work 15 or fewer hours per week. Working few hours appears to have little positive or negative effect on adolescents' academic or psychosocial functioning. On the other hand, working more than 20 hours each week, common to about one-third of employed adolescents, is associated with many poor outcomes, such as poor school attendance, performance, and motivation; risk of school dropout; and problem behaviors such as smoking, alcohol and substance use, early sexual activity, and delinquency. However, adolescent work can be positive experience if it entails limited hours and if it includes educational and vocational training opportunities and contact with adults.
General Educational Development (GED)
Young people who have dropped out of school have the option of taking a high school equivalency test, the General Educational Development exam (GED). The GED was developed in the late 1940s to certify that returning World War II veterans who had left high school to serve in the military were ready for college or the labor market. Although passing the GED exam can signify that a young person has accumulated the knowledge entailed in earning a high school diploma, GED holders do not fare as well as regular high school graduates in the labor market, and they tend to get much less postsecondary education.
