Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

Publication Date

7-31-1978

Abstract

The major thrust of the study was to question if Piaget has overstated the case for cognitive decentering ability in the cognitive behavior of young adults. A second purpose, involving the contention that cognitive decentering behavior plays a very basic role in determining the success of a written message, was to provide descriptive information concerning the impact of Piaget's theoretical paradigm on decentering performance in the framework of analytical writing. The sample consisted of forty-six university freshmen matched on the variables of sex, age, and ethnicity with forty-six law school students. Subjects were tested individually on three Piagetian tasks assessing cognitive decentering performance, one task assessing formal operational thinking performance, and two analytical writing tasks assessing overall helpfulness to a hypothetical reader who would be the next subject in the research study. The findings of the study give evidence that Piaget's prototypal analysis of cognitive decentering ability in adulthood might be overly bold. On spatial and oral speech decentering measures there appears to be little inter-individual difference in performance. In areas such as recursive thinking and other-directed written language decentering performance and formal operational thinking performance there seems to be considerably more variability in adulthood levels of functioning. A significant effect for level of formal education reflected the fact that the law school subjects performed significantly better than the university freshmen subjects on each measure. The findings of the study suggest that the complex cognitive decentering activity of the type found in recursive thinking and other-directed written language requires the exercise of and abstraction from the cognitive structures of formal operational thought. There is the distinct possibility that the stage of formal operations is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for recursive thinking and other-directed written language decentering to emerge and stabilize. Results indicated that formal operational thinking performance, recursive thinking decentering performance, and oral speech decentering performance provided satisfactory power when combined in one discriminant function to distinguish between low and high decentering performance on the other-directed written language decentering measure. A suggested model, provisionally modifying existing Piagetian interpretation, posited that the interaction between the developmental level of underlying operational structures and the expansion of formal educational experience must be taken into account to explain the presence or absence of behaviors befitting the cognitive decentering label in young adults.

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Secondary Education

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy

First Committee Member (Chair)

Robert Harold White

Second Committee Member

Frances S. Harnick

Third Committee Member

Dean Guy Brodkey

Fourth Committee Member

Vera Polgar John-Steiner

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