Adolescent thinking ála Piaget: The formal stage

Abstract

Two of the formal-stage experiments of Piaget and Inhelder, selected largely for their closeness to the concepts defining the stage, were replicated with groups of average and gifted adolescents. This report describes the relevant Piagetian concepts (formal stage, concrete stage) in context, gives the methods and findings of this study, and concludes with a section discussing implications and making some reformulations which generally support but significantly qualify some of the central themes of the Piaget-Inhelder work. Fully developed formal-stage thinking emerges as far from commonplace among normal or average adolescents (by marked contrast with the impression created by the Piaget-Inhelder text, which chooses to report no middle or older adolescents who function at less than fully formal levels). In this respect, the formal stage differs appreciably from the earlier Piagetian stages, and early adolescence emerges as the age for which a “single path” model of cognitive development becomes seriously inadequate and a more complex model becomes essential. Formal-stage thinking seems best conceptualized, like most other aspects of psychological maturity, as a potentiality only partially attained by most and fully attained only by some.