A cosmopolitan education must help us identify with those who are unlike us. In Martha Nussbaum's words, students must learn "enough to recognize common aims, aspirations, and values, and enough about these common ends to see how variously they are instantiated in the many cultures and their histories." It is commonly thought that reading serious…

The practice of gatekeeping within the profession of counseling is well documented in the literature. Counselor educators are charged with the responsibility of serving as gatekeepers for the profession. However, a number of factors inhibit the practice of gatekeeping, including fears of retribution, loss, or damage. At the same time, failure to…

The impact of competition on academic outcomes is likely to depend on whether parents are informed about schools' effectiveness or valued added (which may or may not be correlated with absolute measures of their quality), and on whether this information influences their school choices, thereby affecting schools' market outcomes. To explore these…

This paper looks at underlying patterns of school effectiveness through analysing a GCSE examination data-set over a period of ten cohorts (1993-2002) in one very large English school district. Both value added and raw score approaches were explored by employing different statistical multilevel models to examine time trends of school and pupil…

Moral text processing was used as an ecologically valid method for assessing implicit and explicit moral understanding and development. The authors tested undergraduates, seminarians, and graduate students in political science and philosophy for recall of moral narratives and moral expository texts. Multivariate analyses of covariance using…

This study examined 3- to 7-year old children's knowledge about gender roles and moral and social norms, their beliefs about the possibility of violating these roles and norms, and their attitudes about children who do. The gender role norms were grouped into several categories: toys, games, play styles, adult occupations, adult parental roles,…

The very existence of pluralism and democratic societies is based on a commitment to certain values, since they do not keep their members in line by sheer force. Theoretically this means that antidemocratic values choices of large numbers of people would lead to the end of such societies. Thus a problem encountered by these societies is how to…

This study examined the gender differences in moral orientation among 162 children, ages 11 through 13. Subjects were enrolled in the Minnesota Mother-Child Interaction Project, a longitudinal study of high-risk children and their families. Semi-structured interviews were used to determine each child's ability to understand and use moral…

The 45 tests described in this bibliography assess the moral development and values of populations at all age and grade levels (particularly target toward those above grade 7). Some of the instruments consist of questions that pose moral problems and respondents must select a solution. Several of the tests are concerned about professional ethics.…

Dynamic Concept Analysis (DCA) is introduced as a means of building conceptual models in case studies and using information of concept relations in developing general and individual models to depict a particular phenomenon. DCA enables holistic studies of complex phenomena and analyzes the relationships between concepts to express these relations…

Moral development is viewed as a matter of progression in the cognitive reasoning and rationale underlying choices and judgments. Traditionally, retrospective reports of rationales have been used to measure moral development levels, resulting in unreliable information. Information Integration Theory attempts to assess individual differences in…

A case study of a novice poet based on six interviews reveals significant differences in the writing processes of beginning and experienced poets. While the novice's unfamiliarity with other poets' work or methods of working and his own practice of writing only when he spontaneously finds himself in a certain mood distinguished him as a beginner,…

Provides recommendations for improving the quality and relevance of rehabilitation research. Recommendations include (a) increasing positive collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and disabled consumers in the planning, designing, and implementation of rehabilitation research projects; (b) expanding the use of single-case experimental…

Teachers with relatively high scores on the Defining Issues Test of moral development, contrasted with teachers with relatively low scores, had a more democratic view of teacher and student roles, and saw rules as protecting the rights of individual students as well as the group's rights. (NH)

Describes working with psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg in developing assessments of a group's sense of community, mutual acceptance of social norms, and the democratic process. Explains how Kohlberg influenced the author's professional work. (Author/NB)