Discernable Age-related Patterns

By Author: Lisa Brace
Total Articles: 74
Comment this article

As individuals mature, age-related (but not age-dictated) changes become apparent in the way they organize and reorganize their thinking to interpret experience. These changes are posited to evolve in cycles of differentiation and integration, reflecting developmental patterns of increasing complexity and ability to connect elements. An example of increased complexity is reflected in the observation by Narvaez and Bock (2002), quoted above in reference to experts having a rich mental architecture with more complex and elaborate mental models. As the process of Replica Tag Heuer Carrera constructing new mental models evolves, each new approach becomes consolidated over time, the new approach becomes more automatic, and the new norm becomes one's "everyday" way of functioning. Each increasingly complex level may be considered a developmental benchmark, one that is built on prior levels and sets the groundwork for subsequent levels. Thus, the overall pattern of increasing complexity over time illustrates the concept of sequentially. As discussed below, ...
... a sequential pattern does not necessarily convey an assumption that development is linear.

When a way of organizing experience is found to be wanting, the individual is motivated to adapt. For example, when a student who uses a bifurcated belief system (characterized by the use of either/or, right/ wrong, and we/they categories) sees a respected authority figure making an exception to a rule, she might reexamine her approach to allow for consideration of exceptions, introducing a shade of gray in an otherwise black-and-white world. At the junctures between developmental levels, individuals often report an experience that leads them to reconsider and dismantle existing forms of thinking, making distinctions among elements previously combined (differentiation) and creating new forms of thinking (integrating the reorganized elements) that Replica Cartier Pasha can accommodate new or discrepant information or insights. Cycles of differentiation and integration are uneven steps of unpredictable duration in the developmental process and are related to theorists' assumptions about the nature of development.

Many scholars of human development have attempted to map changes in thinking over the lifespan, resulting in rich theorizing about the nature and course of development. The focus of this section is on these patterns of change (developmental sequences) in models of cognitive and moral development. This type of sequence differentiates developmental theories from typologies; although typologies provide important insights about individual and subgroup differences, they are typically portrayed as stable personality traits, not characteristics that evolve and adapt over time. The models discussed here provide alternative conceptions of how development unfolds, differ in focus between the life span and the college years, are motivated by attention to different factors, are informed by a variety of samples, and are based on different approaches to assessment, and thus offer different insights into the nature of development. All inform our understanding of intellectual and moral development.