Adolescent Psychological Development: Rationality, Morality, And Identity

This advanced text presents a constructivist approach to the development of rationality, morality, and identity in adolescence and early adulthood. It provides a review, long overdue in the developmental literature of post-Piagetian approaches to adolescent cognition, examining classic theories and current research in these three domains. In addition, it highlights the capacity of constructivist theorizing to address issues of human diversity and the implications of a constructivist perspective for secondary education. Accessible even to students with no background in psychology, this book will also be of interest to scholars who study the development of rationality, morality, and/or identity, especially those who are concerned with the interrelations among these domains and with theoretical questions concerning the nature of psychological development beyond childhood.

Review from the first edition:
"...I wish to note how pleasantly surprised I was in becoming acquainted with this volume, after 30 years of teaching adolescence courses. Here students are offered a real vision of a period of life that, in most cases, they have just traversed or are still experiencing. Each part is very precise, accurate, and eminently readable. Difficult ideas are explained without condescending adjustments to the student's presumed capacities or interests. For instance, the chapters on moral development are among the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and balanced treatments of this issue that I have seen in textbooks."
―Contemporary Psychology

Review from the first edition:
"Professor Moshman has written an engaging, uncommonly clear, and uniformly stimulating textbook that will also prove to be an important addition to the adolescent development literature--a rare achievement indeed....This is a careful, well thought-out analysis of three foundational literatures in adolescent development--but now we see better than ever before how they hang together, how they can be integrated with a useful metatheoretical perspective, and why this coherent integration, and perspective, is crucial for the way we educate adolescents. I do believe that the way we conceptualize these features of adolescent development will never be quite the same after the publication of this text."
―Daniel Lapsley, Ph.D.
Ball State University