13.2 Appendix c: the reflective practitioner  (Page 10/25)

What did Saltzstein and his colleagues find out—or more to the point, what did Kelvin Seifert learn from what Saltzstein and his colleagues wrote about? There were three ideas that occurred to Kelvin. One was that in everyday life, children probably deal with moral beliefs of all levels of cognitive complexity, and not just "simple" moral conflicts and "complex" moral dilemmas. Saltzstein found that children's solutions to moral dilemmas depended a lot on the content of the dilemma. Children advocated strongly for truthfulness in some situations (for example, in deciding whether to tell the teacher about a friend's cheating), but not in other situations (like in deciding whether to back up a friend who is being teased and who has lied in an effort to stop the teasing). But it was rare for all children to support any one moral principle completely; they usually supported a mix.

Another idea that Kelvin learned from Saltzstein's research was about how children expressed moral heteronomy versus moral autonomy. Age, it seemed, did not affect the beliefs that children stated; younger and older children took similar positions on all dilemmas initially. But age did affect how steadfastly children held to initial beliefs. Younger children were more easily influenced to switch opinions when an adult "cross-examined" with probing questions; older children were more likely to keep to their initial position. Moral heteronomy was revealed not by a child's views as such, but by the kind of dialogue a child has with adults.

A third idea that Kelvin learned was about children's perceptions of adults' moral beliefs. Saltzstein found that even though older children (the 11-year-olds) showed more moral autonomy (were more steadfast) than younger children, they tended to believe that adults thought about moral issues in ways similar to children who were younger. In the "teasing" dilemma mentioned above, for example, the 11-year-olds opted much more often than 7-year-olds for remaining loyal to a friend, even though doing so meant further untruthfulness with peers. Yet the 11-year-olds also more often stated a belief that adults would resolve the same dilemma in a way characteristic of 7-year-olds—that is, by telling the truth to peers and thus betraying loyalty to a friend. This finding puzzled Kelvin. Why should older, and presumably more insightful, children think that adults are more like younger children than like themselves? Saltzstein suggested an interpretation, however, that helped him make sense of the apparent inconsistency: