Abstract
The author reflects on Piaget’s 1972 article, ‘Intellectual evolution from adolessence to adulthood, addressed to questions regarding what he alleged to be the final, most advanced level of cognition in
his developmental stage theory – formal operations, as described in his 1958 volume coauthored with Inhelder, The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence. It is asked here whether, from a contemporary perspective, Piaget’s ideas regarding formal operations appear to have been right, and whether they have any current relevance, in particular concerning how best to support the development of intellectual potential during the second decade of life.
Piaget’s article, ‘Intellectual evolution from adolescence to adulthood,’ published in this journal in 1972, is a historically significant one in a number of respects. It is only the second of two of his extensive writings addressed to cognitive development beyond middle childhood. The other is the 1958 volume, The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence, coauthored with Inhelder. It is this volume that gave rise to the set of questions that are addressed in the 1972 article. The relatively little attention paid to cognitive development during the second decade of life extends well beyond Piaget’s works. Indeed, it remains apparent today, as contemporary cognitive development research more than ever focuses on early origins of cognitive competencies. Adolescence as a field of study is thriving, yet the multitude of adolescence texts contain at most a slim chapter or part of a chapter on adolescent cognitive development [Kuhn, 2006; for an important exception, see Moshman, 2005].
Piaget’s 1972 article is significant in a further respect, however, beyond its attention to a largely neglected period in studies of the developing intellect. This significance is in relation to Piaget’s own earlier and by 1972 formidable body of published work. Over the preceding five decades, Piaget had gradually articulated an increasingly systematic developmental theory whose major tenets had become widely known. The functionally invariant mechanism of adaptation, comprising the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation, yields a sequence of cognitive structures of predictable form, despite a less predictable rate of construction.
In their 1958 volume, Inhelder and Piaget described in detail what they characterized as the final structure in this evolution, the structure of formal operations. This volume and theoretical advance attracted substantial attention on the part of an English-speaking audience, including efforts to replicate the phenomena that provided evidence of an adolescent transition from a concrete operational to a formal operational level of cognitive functioning. These efforts led to Piaget’s finding himself in a new position. Prior to this time, efforts to replicate Piaget’s findings with respect to his early stages of sensorimotor intelligence, preoperations, and concrete operations had generally proven to be supportive of Piaget’s claims. The timing might vary, but across the disparate cultures that were investigated, children appeared to progress through more or less the sequence of ways of understanding the world that Piaget had described.
In the case of formal operations, in contrast, reports came in that many older adolescents and even adults performed in a nonformal operational manner on In-helder and Piaget’s tasks (for the two major reviews of research of that period, see Keating [1980] and Neimark [1975]). In his 1972 article, then, Piaget for the first time was faced with evidence that appeared to be at odds with his theoretical model. In the article, he acknowledges this fact and undertakes to examine its implications.
In his doing so, we can observe another feature new to Piaget’s writings to this point. Much of the earlier work tended to be instructive to the point of being dogmatic: this is what we can expect to see in the child’s thinking at a given stage and this is the underlying structure that accounts for it. In discussing the formal operational stage in his 1972 article, in contrast, Piaget lays out and leaves open significantly different alternative accounts of how intellectual development proceeds through the second and into the third decade of life.
His position remains firm that the same universal sequence of cognitive structures is constructed by each individual, culminating in the formal operations structure. Moreover, the pace of this evolution is affected by the quality and frequency of opportunity individuals are afforded to engage these intellectual structures. In sharp contrast to his position regarding earlier stage structures, however, for the first time Piaget puts forward the thesis that the formal operations structure may not be manifested across all intellectual domains. He recognizes that by adolescence, individual aptitudes and interests become more important, with the result that individual intellectual profiles become more differentiated. This variability across individuals increases with time and experience, such that by the later part of the second decade, adolescents are likely to have reached their full intellectual potential in only some – perhaps only one or two – of the potential areas of endeavor in which they might have done so. It is in these domains, then, that we must look for and expect to find a formal operational reasoning structure.
But even within this formulation, Formal Operations from a Twenty-First Century Human Development Perspective 2008;51:48–55 Piaget leaves open multiple theoretical possibilities. Most likely, he says, the formal operational structure can be identified across a whole range of intellectual domains (although, in most cases, not within the same individual). But he raises the possibility that new, more specialized structures will be identified that are specific to particular domains of human endeavor. Such a proposal, note, takes Piaget a long way from the universalist theory with which he is most closely associated.
In addition, Piaget leaves open multiple possibilities with respect to the fate of the individual subject. Perhaps some individuals never attain a formal operational level of development, he suggests, implicitly acknowledging the replication data pointing to this conclusion. Alternatively, he proposes, formal operations retain their status as a universally achieved stage structure, although perhaps not attained until the end of adolescence or beginning of adulthood, and then only in the particular domains in which the individual has experience and has undertaken to develop these advanced, formal modes of thought – what Gelman [2002] describes as the ‘non core domains’ that only some individuals choose to explore.
These are quite different alternatives – indeed, even today the available evidence is insufficient to choose between them. Let us turn, then, to where Piaget’s ideas stand some three decades later, with a new century underway. (This article only a summary, to get the full text please contact admin web, use the contact form)
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