Students in Upper Secondary School and the Education of Democratic Citizens : A study through questionnaire of student groups’ levels of moral and cognitive development.

This study is grounded in an interest in the Swedish Upper Secondary Schools’ role as an educator of democratic citizens, with a specific interest in the moral and cognitive development of Upper Secondary School students. Development in these two areas is treated as results of citizenship education. The purpose of the study is to examine moral and cognitive development of students in Upper Secondary School to see if there are any structural differences to be found between the Upper Secondary School programs that are vocationally oriented and the programs that are preparing for further studies on higher levels – since these differences have been both theoretically and empirically implied. The study is based on an enhanced version of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development (with teachers’ evaluations of students’ capacity as a reference point of the students’ actual level of moral development) as well as on Kieran Egan’s theory of development through the use of cognitive tools (as seen in five different “shapes of understanding”). There is also a specific interest in how the teachers’ evaluations of the students’ development in the two areas mentioned coincide. The study has been carried out in the shape of an electronic questionnaire sent to Upper Secondary School teachers in Stockholm. The results showed that there were great differences between the evaluations made by teachers working in vocationally oriented programs and by teachers working in programs preparing for further studies on higher levels. Generally, teachers working in programs preparing for further studies on higher levels estimated that their students had a capacity greater than average, whileteachers working in vocationally oriented programs estimated that their students had a capacity below average. Teachers working in “theoretical” programs to a larger extent estimated that their students had a use of cognitive tools which was to be expected from their age, while teachers working in vocationally oriented programs to a larger extent estimated that their students had a use of cognitive tools which could be expected from students not yet fully capable of reading and writing. The results also showed that the groups of students who were said to use cognitive toolsexpected from their age at the same time were estimated to have a relatively low level of capacity