The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the effect of a curricular application of the integrative ethical education (IEE) model (Narvaez, 2006; Narvaez & Bock, 2014) and its effect on first-year college students' ethical development. Using a pretest posttest design, participants' moral judgment and reasoning were measured…

This study contributes to a developmental approach focusing on emotions as being of key significance in explaining the Happy Victimizer pattern (HV pattern) among adults. Based on findings from our own research on moral emotions within the Happy Victimizer paradigm, we claim that a purely cognitive approach to explain the HV is overly narrow.…

This study aimed at identifying moral judgment for education profession ethics among pre-service teachers programs of the School of Educational Sciences at the University of Jordan. Accordingly, the researchers developed a Moral Judgment Scale based on Kohlberg (1984), and on the Adult Moral Judgment Scale localized by Abdul-Fattah (2001). The…

Research on the Happy Victimizer Phenomenon has mainly focused on preschool and schoolchildren, with a few studies also including adolescents and young adults. The main finding is that young children, despite knowing that harming someone is wrong, ascribe positive feelings to perpetrators and offer hedonistic justifications, interpreted as a lack…

The moral reasoning development of college freshmen was investigated over the course of a semester. Participants were tested at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester and were either in a course that required active engagement in critical thinking (e.g. perspective-taking, reflection) about social and political issues or in a…

Problem Statement: The ability to say no when faced with demands with possible moral consequences becomes a problem that must be addressed in terms of morality in all of its dimensions, including in terms of the concept of character. "Character" can be defined from different perspectives, and within the framework of moral anatomy. For…

For the better part of the past 100 years, John Dewey, Ernest Boyer, and other higher education reform advocates have challenged universities to hold true to their civic roots and responsibilities by promoting teaching and scholarship in the context of the real world. In response, service-learning has evolved into a viable pedagogy to encourage…

This mixed methods study explored aspects of the internship experience that are responsible for moral growth changes among undergraduates in a recreation management discipline. This study addressed four aims: (1) to investigate changes in interns' moral reasoning as determined by the Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT-2) over the course of a 14-week…

In this paper, we offer an overview and a critique of the existing theories of the moral-conventional distinction, with emphasis on Nichols's [Nichols, S. (2002). Norms with feeling: Towards a psychological account of moral judgment. "Cognition, 84", 221-236] neo-sentimentalist approach. After discussing some distinctive features of Nichols's…

Teachers tasked with developing moral character in future physicians face an array of pedagogic challenges, among them identifying tools to measure progress in instilling the requisite skill set. One validated instrument for assessing moral judgment is the Defining Issues Test (DIT-2). Based on the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, the test's main…

The goal of this study was to investigate how moral development changes over time for teacher education master's students during their year-long internship. Data on the Defining Issues Test-2 was collected at three points in time during the full-year teaching internships (beginning, end of first semester, and end of second semester). These…

Current models of moral functioning such as those of Rest (1983) and Damon and Hart (1988) have maintained that optimal moral development and consistent moral action require the presence of multiple constructs. In order to examine the importance of the presence of multiple variables relevant to moral functioning, structural equation modeling was…

Gains in moral judgement, as measured by the Defining Issues Test (DIT), correlate strongly with advancing education. Curricula that are strongly biblically based may not promote, and students with a strong fundamentalist orientation may not demonstrate, such moral growth. Students at an interdenominational, but very conservative seminary,…

The present study investigates whether epistemic cognition in moral domain (dubbed "metaethical cognition") develops analogously to epistemic reasoning regarding empirical knowledge. The study's conceptual framework distinguishes two main areas of metaethical cognition (beliefs about the nature of moral judgments and conceptions of the process of…

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…