Life Span Development II School Age and Adolescence

Life Span Development II: School age and Adolescence 3 (2+1)

Lesson 18 : Cognitive development during Adolescence

Implications of formal thought

• It may prepare an ideal to gain a sense of identity, think in more complex ways about moral issues and understand other people.
• Can think more independently, imagine alternatives to present realities and raise questions about everything from why parents set rules, where there is injustice in the world?
• They should capable of understanding concepts like negative numbers and infinity. Ex. They can understand the temperature below ‘0” and how 2 parallel lines never touch. Because they can now use proportions in their reasoning.
• Can study and understand fractions, ratios and decimals and they can use such proportions to solve problems.
• They can understand how the world might be different i.e. better than existing situations. So they exhibit some idealism about social, political, religious and ethical issues. Piaget suggested that adolescent idealism reflects formal operational egocentrism, an inability to separate one’s own logical abstractions from the perspectives of others from practical considerations.