A study was undertaken (1) to determine if a relationship existed between preadolescents' levels of reading comprehension as defined by T. C. Barrett's Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension and their levels of moral development according to Lawrence Kohlberg's stage sequence and (2) to discover if females demonstrated higher levels of reading…

Three questions were addressed in this study: 1) What are the levels of relationships among level of moral development, attitudes toward teaching and role specific self-concept in a group of entering teacher education candidates? 2) What differences exist between elementary and secondary candidates in areas of moral development, teacher attitudes…

Based upon the theory of moral stages devised by educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, this report examines the influence of the social situation on principled moral reasoning and on cheating. Research assessed the level of moral reasoning for 152 college juniors and seniors using Rest's Defining Issues Test (1976) in which levels of low,…

Children in five second grade classrooms were exposed to an educational intervention designed to facilitate their moral development. Compared to a control group, they showed statistically significant growth in the following variables: role taking, intentionality, positive justice, punishment and donating behavior. Correlational analyses revealed…

The paper, presented in four sections, draws a distinction between citizenship education and values education. Section I defines the six major goals of citizenship education: the development of participatory skills and of intellectual skills; growth in knowledge of facts, concepts, and generalizations; personal development; development of dramatic…

Two classrooms of first graders (n-40) were administered Damon's moral judgment measure, Spivack and Shure's social problems solving measure and Stanford-Binet vocabulary. Concurrently, two observers recorded in the children's school environment incidences of successful resolutions of interactions, amount of derogation, and the number of times a…

This report deals with how American parents are raising their children in a period of rapid social change. The study was conducted in three stages: an intensive exploratory phase based on eight focus-group discussions in different areas of the country with both parents and children; in-depth interviews with nearly 100 experts who deal with the…

A Piagetian perspective is used to build a rationale to explain why group games are good for young children. Three major areas in which group games might foster children's development are discussed. In the socioemotional area, the rationale is that moral development, personality development, and autonomy are enhanced by the social context of peer…

This document presents lectures and dialogues from a two-day colloquium in which experts from academic fields outside of education identified and examined values upon which schooling might and should focus; that is, the identification of moral imperatives. The Association for Supervision and Development (ASCD) lectures were planned in order to…

This study investigated the interrelationships among the development of role-taking skills, moral judgments, and sharing behavior of boys and girls in K-3. A total of 160 lower middle class white children (20 boys and 20 girls from each grade) participated in the study. Data were collected on four measures: (1) sharing candy with a friend, (2)…

The first part of this manuscript relates the initial efforts of a teacher who attempted to apply the value clarification approach in an eighth grade social studies class. The approach is based on Louis Rath's seven-part approach to values clarification which encourages children to choose and to prize one's beliefs and behaviors, and to act on…

A four-part series of papers on values education comprises this document. Part one presents a brief background of moral education in the United States, beginning with the Puritans, and including references to Horace Mann, William Holmes McGuffey, and others. Tracing its history, the author defines values education and its need in the school…

In this position paper, the authors respond to the frequent criticisms and charges that values clarification is value free, relativistic, superficial, and without a cogent theoretical or research base. The authors first examine values clarification as theory. As originally developed by Raths, values education is a theory based on the thinking of…

Ways junior high teachers and parents view moral education are examined. Interviews, conducted with a sample population of teachers and parents in Philadelphia, Memphis, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, indicate there was virtually unanimous agreement that schools inherently play an important part in moral education since teachers are seen as role…

Stages of moral reasoning through which children develop, as researched by developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, are outlined in the introduction of this paper. The six stages are defined and exemplified by the moral issue of the value of human life. The developmental model, as it is argued, is suitable for instruction in…