Thinking in the Adolescent Years

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Thinking in the Adolescent Years
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Ask yourself

• How did your thinking change when you became a
  teenager?
• What did you think about?
• How did you think?
• Do boys think differently than girls?

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Cognitive Development in Adolescence

• New cognitive competencies
• Thinking about what is possible, not just actual
  events
• Making generalizations as a basis for specific
  conclusions

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Teens can go beyond concrete operational thought

• They move away from only the here-and-now
• They are more logical and systematic in analyzing
  ideas

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Three keys to formal operational thinking

• Seeing possibilities
• Scientific reasoning
• Skillful combining of ideas

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Major Achievement of Adolescence

• Formal or abstract thinking
• What if? It could happen
• You take mental note of factors that might affect
  a situation
• You test the effects of certain behaviors and
  examine them carefully
• Converting formal reasoning from a goal to a tool

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Formal or abstract reasoning

• Helps teens argue with their parents more
  skillfully
• Contributes to the stereotype of teens being
  rebellious
• Makes teens more skillful at cultivating
  friendships, dates, social contacts

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Formal or abstract reasoning also

• Helps them to imagine and anticipate consequences
• Leads them to be more interested in philosophical
  questions - the meaning of life, love, politics
• Enables them to see contradictions

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Information-Processing

• Human cognition is a complex storage and
  retrieval system
• It has an executive control system that transfers
  information between short-term and long-term
  memory
• It organizes information for efficient handling

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Adolescent Information-Processing

• Increased capacity for taking in, organizing, and
  remembering larger amounts of information
• Structural capacity increases greater mental
  power and cognitive ability
• (like having bigger and more powerful muscles
  than a child)

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Increased functional capacity

• Ability to make efficient use of mental abilities
• Improved performance because they can coordinate
  their movements
• They can coordinate existing skills to best
  advantage

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Improved thinking comes from both

• Structural capacity
• Functional capacity
• Greater ability to hold information and to
  process it

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• Wisdom comes with experience
• Knowing when to apply firm principles and when
  to accept that not all of lifes problems are
  resolved by logic

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Moral Development Beliefs About Justice Caring

• Abstract thinking leads to their developing
  personal morality
• Increasingly sophisticated ways of caring about
  friends, family self
• Increasingly logical and abstract principles
  related to fairness and justice

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Gender Differences in Moral Development

• Boys emphasize ethical thinking about justice
• Girls emphasize ethics of caring

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Moral Action

• Does not always follow from moral belief.