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To Members of and attendees at the meeting of the Association for Moral Education, in Nanjing.? You are invited to the Workshop on understanding stage.?The Model of Hierarchical Complexity help you really understand moral development and why all societies move up in stage, including china. We will show that it helps the understanding the stage of Confucius and moral reasoning of the Chinese society. Eva Yujia Li writes: The beauty of the Model of Hierarchical Complexities is that it states a simple but powerful idea - people who are more competent are able to take into account more information and more perspectives.?This is true regardless of what they are doing.?People who are shrewd scientists may have to work with complex formulas and models, which are built up by coordinating simple models and concepts.?People who are socially competent may take into account other people's needs and feelings.?They make compromises taking into account the needs of group members. Leaders have to deal with different types of tasks - people, structure of the organization, goals, etc. This model has an elegant structure that is simple and understandable.?It has truly grasped an essential aspect of intelligence, or more broadly, competence. Moreover, this model describes a pattern that is true in anything in the world - that the more sophisticated structures are built from simpler ones. It applies to societies, physical structures, ecological structures, etc. To think of structures in terms of stages is extremely convenient and helpful to understanding them.?????? As someone who grew up in the Chinese culture, I can see that the message conveyed by the Model of Hierarchical Complexity is easily found in the Chinese culture.?The Chinese culture emphasizes "accumulation", or "Ji Lei". This could mean to accumulate knowledge, wealth, morality, etc. The reason for accumulation is that quantitative change leads to qualitative changes. For example, accumulating more knowledge of one field will lead one to have a qualitative change in one's understanding of the issue. One will have a higher perspective of the knowledge. In the model of hierarchical complexities, this is referred to as a stage change. As one is able to coordinate the knowledge from lower actions, one can accomplish tasks at higher orders. Using the Model of Hierarchical Complexity to analyze Confucius contribution to the ancient China, we find that he has helped the country move up stages. At Confucius¡¯ time, China was in the Spring and Autumn Period.?China?was constantly in a state of war.?The warlords chose governors of the country based on family ties.?All positions of power were inherited or gained through special privileges.?Societies at that time were functioning at the concrete stage 8, in which leadership and policy are determined by weapons, power, tribal and family affiliations. Confucius advocated governing country based on morality, called De in Chinese, ritual, called?Li, and humanitarian, called?Ren. He believed that if everyone behave according to them, the society will be in perfect order.?Moreover, morality was no longer a character of the powerful and privileged.?Confucius believed that everyone should behave according to the right morality and rituals.?Many of his students were from poor families. These abstract ideologies define desired social norms, which are characteristic of a society at the abstract stage?9.?Societies functioning at stage 9 operate under social norms and simple ideologies.?Affiliation with these ideologies marks one as one of the noble people, called JunZi.?Betraying these ideologies marks one as an un-noble person, XiaoRen. Confucius also pushed the society up a stage by introducing the Chinese Imperial Exams.?Governors were chosen based on people¡¯s abilities rather than choosing the family member. The Imperial Exam systematically select governors from people of all classes.?This shows that the society had moved up a stage, from abstract stage 9, to formal stage 10, in which regulations prevail. This workshop teaches people to understand and apply the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System.?Those attending the workshop will learn about 1) the model, 2) the concepts underlying the model, 3) the description of the stages and their relationship to Kegan¡¯s and Kohlberg¡¯s stages, and 4) examples of scoring samples from interviews, illustrating moral development.?The Model of Hierarchical Complexity provides a framework for scoring reasoning stages in any domain as well as in any cultural setting. In the adult population.?This scoring is applied to not only to scoring narratives, but also of instruments.?Instruments consist of five or six vignettes, each one representing one of the stages from order 7 to 12 (primary, concrete, abstract, formal, systematic, and metasystematic).?But they can be constructed for lower stages as well.?The scoring is based not upon the content or the subject material, but instead on the mathematical complexity of hierarchical organization of information. The participant's performance on a task of a given complexity represents the stage of developmental complexity. Also examined are how we resolve difficulties in discerning these stages, and transitions and how they can be scored with reliability and validly. Finally, we present Rasch analysis, which is a method of changing ratings of items into Rasch Scaled Scores both for the items and for the participants.?The results allow for a test of relationship between obtained scaled scores and the underlying hierarchical complexity of the items.?Usually the r > .9.?The Rasch scores also allow for and examination of the coherence of responses instruments. Workshop participants receive a copy of the scoring manual and instruction. Please bring your laptop Email us for instructions.

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