Moral Reasoning During Middle Childhood Essay

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4. Moral Reasoning During Middle Childhood (3 points) a. Define moral reasoning and describe Kohlberg’s 3 levels of moral reasoning (2 points) • According to Woolfolk, “Moral reasoning involves making judgments about the rightness or wrongness of certain acts. Children’s ability to think about moral issues expands tremendously during middle childhood. In part, this is attributable to the general expansion of their reasoning and perspective-taking capacities and to their expanding social world” (Woolfolk, 412). Thus, moral reasoning is the ability to think about certain acts and apply rules, values, or theories to them to determine whether or not they are right or wrong acts. Given an act, a person with moral reasoning would be able to think about the act in multiple ways and determine whether it was good, bad, or landed in a ‘grey’ area. • “Lawrence Kohlberg (1963, 1975, 1981) divided moral development into three levels: (1) preconventional, where judgment is based solely on a person’s own needs and perceptions; (2) conventional, where the expectations of informal and formal groups, society, and law are taken into account; and (3) postconventional, where judgments are based on more generalizable universal principles that are personally held and not necessarily based on society’s …show more content…

By this she means, metacognition is a person’s thoughts about their thoughts, or the ability to think about the way the person thinks. Metacognition is used in many different ways. For instance, “…judging if you have the right knowledge to solve a problem, deciding where to focus attention, determining if you understood what you just read, devising a plan, revising the plan as you proceed, determining if you have studied enough to pass a test, evaluating a problem solution, deciding to get help, and generally orchestrating your cognitive powers to reach a goal” (Woolfolk,