"A good education is ...." The development of evaluative thought across the life span

The author uses a cognitive developmental approach to investigate educational conceptions, addressing the question, How does evaluative reasoning about education change over the course of cognitive development? The author conducted independent analyses of the developmental level and conceptual content of 246 interview performances of individuals aged 5 to 86 years. The developmental level of the interview performances was assessed with a content-general scoring system, the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System. A Rasch analysis of the results revealed 6 developmental levels and provided support for invariant sequence, developmental spurts and plateaus, and similar developmental patterns for childhood and adulthood levels. The results of the subsequent analysis of the propositional content of the same interview texts were used to produce qualitative descriptions of changes in evaluative reasoning about education across the 6 levels identified in the data. Finally, descriptions constructed in this way, although richer and less prone to reification, were shown to be conceptually analogous to the stage definitions produced by other cognitive developmental researchers. The implications of the method and findings are discussed.