Little is known about how to mitigate moral distress within occupational therapy, but ethics education may reduce its impact by providing practitioners with tools for managing ethical problems. This study aimed to explore the impact of ethics education on managing ethical problems among occupational therapy practitioners within the first five…

I describe the first stages of a process of design research in which I employ problem-based learning in a course in engineering ethics, which fulfills a requirement for students in engineering degree programs. The aim of the course is to foster development of particular cognitive skills contributing to moral imagination, a capacity to notice,…

The ethics assessment industry is currently dominated by the second version of the Defining Issues Test (DIT2). In this article, we describe an alternative assessment instrument called the Sphere-Specific Moral Reasoning and Theory Survey (SMARTS), which measures the respondent's level of moral development in several respects. We describe eight…

Purpose: The public expects school leaders to be moral exemplars, yet prior research indicates that teachers and, more recently, school principals may score lower than other career groups on a widely used measure of moral reasoning, the Defining Issues Test. Moreover, little empirical research has been conducted on educators during leadership…

In this paper we propose that taking time before the work begins to develop agreements about how to work together in participatory action research enables researchers to directly address several ethical issues that can be problematic in this type of research: gaining fully informed consent; in-group confidentiality; cultural misconceptions; and…

The application of social-emotional and character development (SECD) in classrooms is about teaching, practicing, and modeling essential personal and civic life habits and skills that are almost universally understood as making people good human beings. Among these habits are respect, responsibility, integrity, caring, fairness, and constructive…

Author shows that teachers cannot remain effectively detached from the moral education of their students. (Editor/MB)

Outlines how one veteran high school teacher wrote up an everyday moral dilemma (obliquely involving drug trafficking) for his students to discuss and solve. Notes problem-solving steps and questions, and how the students worked their way to a solution through discussion. (SR)

We present the results of a literature review of studies on teaching strategies for moral education in secondary schools (1995-2003). The majority of the studies focus on the "what" and "why", i.e. the objectives, of curriculum-oriented moral education. Attention to the instructional formats for enhancing the prosocial and moral development of…

The need for affective education has been expressed throughout the history of public schools. Justification for moral education today can be made on the basis of any of the five most common types of needs: normative, felt, expressed, comparative, or anticipated. (Author/MLF)

This article focuses on the development of, and new theorising about, a strong democracy education intervention, the Just Community approach. Three questions frame the discussion: (1) Does democracy education change children and adolescents or do students in these programs change their schools, or is there a dynamic interaction over time? (2) How…

Summarizes several creative strategies to increase students' awareness of, and commitment to, constructive values in a classroom setting. These simple exercises include brainstorming and reverse brainstorming, imagining consequences, analogical thinking, empathy, questioning and discussion, and problem-solving approaches. (MLH)

Kohlberg's interpretation of moral choice is criticized. The alternative view proposed locates Kohlberg's conception of moral choice as a stage in a larger process of moral deliberation that has a progressive structure. How deficiencies of the Kohlberg approach can be remedied is suggested. (Author/RM)

Four papers on values education with gifted students are presented. (CL)

Eighteen parents participated in a Deliberate Psychological Education program designed to enhance their moral judgement and indirectly influence the moral development of their children. In a quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group design, their progress was compared to that of 19 participants in a no-treatment control condition. There was a…