Kohlberg's Moral Development

Overview

Lawrence Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development is a cornerstone topic in Child Development and Pedagogy for HTET. Kohlberg extended Piaget's work on moral reasoning and proposed that moral development occurs in six stages across three levels. Unlike Piaget who studied younger children, Kohlberg's research focused on children, adolescents, and adults using moral dilemmas (most famously, the Heinz Dilemma).

For HTET, you must know the three levels (pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional), their six stages, the age associations, and how teachers can apply this understanding in classrooms. Questions typically test your ability to identify which stage a child's reasoning belongs to, or ask about educational implications of the theory.

This theory emphasises that moral development is about the *reasoning* behind a decision, not the decision itself. Two children may reach the same conclusion but be at different moral stages based on *why* they made that choice.

Key Concepts

• **Moral reasoning develops in invariant sequence**: All individuals progress through stages in the same order; stages cannot be skipped, though not everyone reaches the highest stages.

• **Focus on reasoning, not behaviour**: Kohlberg assessed moral *thinking*, not moral *action*. The justification matters more than the answer.