Patricia M. King

Reflective judgment: Concepts of justification and their relationship to age and education☆

This paper describes a seven-stage model of post-adolescent reasoning styles, the most advanced of which is called “Reflective Judgment.” The model outlines a sequence of increasingly complex methods of justification of beliefs. This model demonstrates how peoples conceptions of the nature of knowledge, the nature of reality, and their concepts of justification change over age/educational levels. Sixty subjects from three age/educational levels (high school, college, and graduate school) were administered the Reflective Judgment Interview. In addition, subjects were tested on four other factors hypothesized to affect reflective judgment scores. Two were competing theoretical constructs: verbal ability (using Termans Concept Mastery Test) and Piagetian formal operations (chemicals and pendulum tasks); and two were potentially confounding factors: socio-economic status (using Hollingsheads two-factor index) and verbal fluency (number of words spoken during the interview). Highly significant differences (p < .001) were found on reflective judgment level between the three age/educational groups, and could not be statistically accounted for by scores earned on measures of the other four factors. Whereas verbal ability was found to be closely related to reflective judgment level, the differences between groups on reflective judgment could not be solely attributed to this factor.

Critical Thinking among College and Graduate Students.

Critical thinking is a major goal of post-secondary instruction, but empirical evidence that undergraduates have developed this skill is minimal and is virtually nonexistent for graduate students. Further, various critical thinking measures focus on different types of problems that require different cognitive strategies, yielding mixed results. This study investigated differences in critical thinking between undergraduate and graduate students in the social and mathematical sciences, using multiple measures of critical thinking that reflect different types of problem structure. The authors found educational level and academic area differences across measures, which they explain by the type of problem structures that the disciplines emphasize and by the measure of critical thinking.

The Justification of Beliefs in Young Adults: A Longitudinal Study

Recent work on adult thought has focused on the emergence of relativistic, dialectic, or integrative assumptions about knowledge. In 1981, Kitchener and King developed a model of reflective judgment that describes seven sets of assumptions about reality and knowledge and corresponding concepts of intellectual justification. This article reports a 2-year longitudinal study of three groups of adolescents and young adults (n = 59) who were tested on the Reflective Judgment Interview and on the Concept Mastery Test, a measure of verbal aptitude. Significant group (p

A longitudinal study of moral and ego development in young adults

The purpose of this study was to investigate the longitudinal changes in moral judgment and ego development in a young adult sample when a concurrent measure of verbal ability was used as a statistical control. Sixty-one late adolescents and young adults, representing three educational groups, were tested in 1977 and 1979 on the Defining Issues Tests, a measure of moral judgment (Rest), the Sentence Completion Test of Ego Development (Loevinger and Wessler) and Termans Concept Mastery Test, a measure of verbal ability. No group or time differences were found in ego development. A significant increase was found between the 1977 and 1979 moral judgment scores,p<0.05, and between groups at both testing,p<0.001. Sex differences were found,p<0.01, with females scoring higher than males, which were statistically accounted for by verbal ability. These findings suggest that moral development continues into the young adult years and that verbal ability may moderate sex differences in moral judgment.

Intellectual development and its relationship to maturation during the college years

Abstract This study examines whether differences in the development of critical reasoning abilities among undergraduates can be attributed to factors other than college attendance, and specifically to differences in chronological maturation. Eight males and eight females were randomly selected and matched on ACT composite scores from each of four groups: 18-year-old freshmen; 22-year-old freshmen; 22-year-old seniors; and 26-year-old seniors. Theses 64 subjects were arranged within a non-assignable three factor design by age (adult and traditional), class level (freshman and senior), and sex. Subjects were administered the Reflective Judgment Interview, a structured interview format designed to measure the way individuals reason about intellectual problems. Two significant main effects were observed, with seniors scoring higher than freshman (p