The institutional affiliation
Humans make life-changing decisions every day and it is of high importance that those decisions are made deliberately and carefully. Moreover, an answer or a solution to the arisen issue may be constructed in different stages of thinking. Sometimes it is hard to determine the stage of thinking and cognitive development. In order to complete this task, I have interviewed my family member and my friend about the most significant and powerful decisions in their lives, about people who have helped them make those decisions and about their current opinions of those exact situations and if they would set their choice on the same point now.
The first person I have chosen to interview was my 38-year-old aunt. When the question about her life-changing decision was asked, the answer was not long in coming. The story was dedicated to the period of time when she decided to adopt a child. It is necessary to explain that my aunt has always wanted a child. In any case, it took her a year long time to make one of the most momentous decisions. “It was the hardest period in my life. I still think about it a lot and most importantly, I have never regretted about the decision I have made. Firstly, I had been thinking if the life conditions I would be able to provide would be appropriate and comfortable for a child,” my aunt responded. It is worth noting that she was confident and positive while speaking.
In addition, she also told me that she had been choosing the most felicitous state of her soul, mind, health, and income to take care of a young person. It had also been mentioned that nobody had helped her to make this decision. “It was the most stressful decision in my life. However, I have done it with all my love and care. Obviously, I would never change it,” she said at the end of our conversation. According to the Piagetian Stage Cognitive Development Theory, my interviewee is a representative of the post-formal stage. The post-formal stage is related to problem solving, which begins to be more scientific and systematic (Wadsworth & Wadsworth, 1984). This heads the process of thinking through possible explanations for certain events rather than verifying for outcomes. She is capable to think logically about abstract suggestions and to test those hypotheses consistently (Lutz & Huitt, 2004). Therefore, she designed situational circumstances that could have appeared. It is evident that she can conduct a deductive reasoning and she had retrieved logical conclusions out of it (Wadsworth & Wadsworth, 1984). She united logic and emotion in order to build context-dependent codes that she had followed (Curious, 2007). Currently she is a loving mother of a 6-year-old girl whom she has already lived together with for 3 years.
In contrast to this, I have asked my friend who is 19 years old to answer the same questions. He named me a variety of situations when he needed to make an important decision: the buying a car moment, romance dilemmas, what advice to offer to a friend, etc. However, he excluded all the above mentioned situations and referred to the most memorable and touching moment in his life. “When I still was in high school, I decided to work in a cafe nearby. I lived with my parents at that time and I did not actually need the money. I just wanted to try myself in a working atmosphere,” he began his monologue. Then, he described his responsibilities in detail. “The school year began and I quit the job. While working in a cafe for 3 months, I have earned 2500$. When I was holding that money in my hands, I thought about how I should spend them. To be honest, my first thought was to buy a new cell phone, but I knew that my parents would present me one on my birthday. After determining all the advantages and disadvantages, I have decided to give all my money earned to the people in need.” He mentioned that he gave the money to the hospital in the area. The interviewee did not end his speech, but made a silent pause and it seemed like he was recalling the events of that exact day. This assumption is supported by the fact that he continued talking about that vital moment of his life with a nice faint smile on his face.
A further point is that neither parents nor friends helped him to make the decision. Additionally, he said that presently he would behave in the same way once again. It is notable that the friend of mine has made multiple hypotheses and evaluated their possible aftermaths (Ojose, 2008). He engaged a scientific reasoning and understands ethics and morality. It should be pointing out that the abstractions that formal stage of the Piagetian theory allows to move a human to a broader outlook and thinking regardless his or her profits (Lutz & Huitt, 2004). That in turn means that my second interviewee represents a formal stage of cognitive development. He acted in an adult-like manner and with adult intelligence which is also a feature of the formal stage of cognitive development. This aspect allows adolescents to reflect and speculate beyond a world of concrete objects and reality to a world of perspectives. In other words, it permits to operate logically on information and symbols that do not obligatorily relate to objects and events in the real world.
As human beings develop, they move through stages that are presented by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. He provided assumptions concerning the stages of cognitive development characterizing the stage-appropriate features and qualifications. However, if one looks at the Piaget’s theory in a historical perspective, one finds that the stages of cognitive development have come under significant criticism and analysis since the year they were introduced. This means that many of his ideas have been added and even impacted other psychological studies. Furthermore, it seems clear that the implementation of the Piaget’s stages makes it easier for parents and teachers to create stage-appropriate activities in order to keep children interested and active.
References
Curious, S. (2007). Formal-Operational vs. Post-Formal Thinking: Brains Grow Up. Classroom as Microcosm. Retrieved 19 June 2016, from https://siobhancurious.com/2007/09/08/formal-operational-vs-post-formal-thinking-in-adolescents-and-emerging-adults/
Lutz, S., & Huitt, W. (2004). Connecting cognitive development and constructivism: Implications from theory for instruction and assessment. Constructivism in the Human Sciences,9(1), 67-90. Retrieved 19 June 2016, from http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/papers/cogdev.pdf
Ojose, B. (2008). Applying Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development to Mathematics Instruction. The Mathematics Educator, Vol. 18, No. 1, 26–30. Retrieved 19 June 2016, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ841568.pdf
Wadsworth, B. & Wadsworth, B. (1984). Piaget's theory of cognitive and affective development. New York: Longman.
