Piaget challenged

Although most developmental psychologists would agree that adolescent thought reflects important advances beyond childhood, not all agree with Piagetians about the nature of the changes, and not all of the evidence is consistent with the theory. For example, large-scale studies have reported that only small proportions of adolescents perform sufficiently well to meet the criteria for formal operational reasoning (Neimark, 1975; Shayer, Kuchemann & Wylam, 1976). The comprehensiveness of Piagetian theory is in doubt if it fails to characterize a majority. Contemporary researchers agree with Piaget that cognitive development does proceed during the adolescent years, but they disagree with him about the patterns and processes entailed (Byrnes, 2003; Klaczinski, 2000). During this period, young people show improved abilities in several areas, including deductive and inductive inferences, objective thinking, mathematical operations and decision making (Byrnes, 2003). But the developmental evidence does not support the Piagetian assumption of domaingeneral transitions. For example, participants’ scores on different reasoning tests do not correlate highly during adolescence, and there are greater age differences on some tests than on others (Csapo, 1997). If a general improvement were underway, we would expect to find comparable and simultaneous improvements across cognitive domains. Instead, adolescents appear to function better in cognitive tasks where they have an existing strong knowledge base (Byrnes, 2003) or have received specific training designed to accelerate performance (Iqbal & Shayer, 2000). These findings lead many researchers to favour domain specific models of cognitive development in adolescence. According to such models, developmental progress depends at least in part on the cognitive opportunities, tasks and challenges to which adolescents are exposed (Byrnes, 2003). Alternative accounts of adolescent reasoning have been advanced more recently, drawing upon information-processing theories, and arguing t hat what really underpins development in adolescence is not so much changes in formal logical skills as changes in processing capacity or efficiency – such as improved memory skills or attention span (Keating, 1990). These capacities may also be linked to ongoing neural developments, as there is now substantial evidence that the frontal lobes continue to develop during adolescence (Byrnes, 2003).