Multidimensional models in a developmental context.

The concept of epistemological development is useful in psychological assessment only insofar as instruments can be designed to measure it consistently, reliably, and without bias. In the psychosocial domain, most traditional stage assessment systems rely on a process of matching concepts in a scoring manual generated from a limited number of construction cases, and thus suffer to some extent from bias introduced by an over-dependence on particular content. On the other hand, Commons' Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System (HCSS) is an assessment that employs criteria for assessing the hierarchical complexity of texts that are independent of specific content. This paper examines whether the HCSS and one of the conventional systems, Kohlberg's Standard Issue Scoring System (SISS) measure the same dimension of performance. A multidimensional partial credit analysis was performed on data collected between 1955 and 1999. The correlation between performance estimates on the SISS and HCSS is 0.92. The high correlation provides strong evidence that the order of hierarchical complexity identified by the HCSS is the same latent dimension of ability assessed with the SISS. The HCSS produced more distinct patterns of ordered stages and wider gaps between adjacent stages. This evidence implies that individual performances display a higher degree of consistency in their hierarchical complexity under the HCSS. A developmental scoring system that employs scoring criteria that are independent of particular content might be more powerful than the traditional scoring systems as it provides easiness in scoring and also possibilities of cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-context comparison of conceptual knowledge within developmental levels.

A stage is a stage is a stage: a direct comparison of two scoring systems.

L. Kohlberg (1969) argued that his moral stages captured a developmental sequence specific to the moral domain. To explore that contention, the author compared stage assignments obtained with the Standard Issue Scoring System (A. Colby & L. Kohlberg, 1987a, 1987b) and those obtained with a generalized content-independent stage-scoring system called the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System (T. L. Dawson, 2002a), on 637 moral judgment interviews (participants' ages ranged from 5 to 86 years). The correlation between stage scores produced with the 2 systems was .88. Although standard issue scoring and hierarchical complexity scoring often awarded different scores up to Kohlberg's Moral Stage 2/3, from his Moral Stage 3 onward, scores awarded with the two systems predominantly agreed. The author explores the implications for developmental research.