What the report covers

The report is a four-way comparison of developmental stage theories used in education and child studies. Kohlberg's stages of moral development sit at the center, then Lowenfeld's stages of artistic development, Erikson's psychosocial stages, and Piaget's cognitive stages.

The useful student move is to say what each chart measures. Mixing them into one age column is the usual error.

Kohlberg's stages of moral development

Kohlberg, building on Piaget, studied how people justify moral choices. The familiar classroom version uses three levels — pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional — and six stages. The Heinz dilemma is the usual teaching example: a reason that cites punishment is not the same as a reason that cites law, or a reason that cites a universal principle.

US education courses often pair this with character-education debates. A fair paper also notes the critiques: Carol Gilligan argued that the original sample and scoring underplayed a care orientation, and later reviews have questioned how tightly the stages travel across cultures.

Lowenfeld's stages of artistic development

Viktor Lowenfeld, in work later published with W. Lambert Brittain, described how children's drawings change: scribbling, preschematic, schematic, dawning realism, and so on. The report uses this as a map of graphic development, not as a moral test.

A classroom use is to look at a drawing for the child's current graphic scheme, rather than to grade it against adult realism too early. That is a different question from Kohlberg's "why is this act right or wrong."

Erikson and Piaget in the same paper

Erikson's stages of psychosocial development name a social crisis at each period, such as industry versus inferiority in the elementary years. Piaget's stages of cognitive development describe how reasoning is reorganized. Neither is a theory of drawing, and neither is a scoring system for moral justifications, even though Kohlberg drew on Piaget.

A clean comparison picks one age, then writes four short portraits: moral justification, graphic scheme, social crisis, and thinking.

Sources

1. Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development, Vol. 1: The philosophy of moral development. Harper & Row.
2. Lowenfeld, V., & Brittain, W. L. (1987). Creative and mental growth (8th ed.). Macmillan.
3. Erikson, E. H. (1950/1963). Childhood and society. W. W. Norton.
4. Piaget, J. (1964). Cognitive development in children: Development and learning. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2(3), 176–186.
5. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Harvard University Press.

Last updated: November 13, 2026