A published rater manual used by sixty elementary school teachers to assess moral thought statements was found ineffective. The study also examined what factors were related to their assessing ability. The subjects took a pretest using only descriptions of the six moral stages originally researched by Lawrence Kohlberg. Next the teachers were given the self training rater manual and a posttest. Correlations of the demographic and personality variables studied with scores on the pre and posttests showed no significant correlations with the posttest and only one significant (but moderate) correlation with the pretest scores. Analysis of variance tests on the pre and posttests showed Stage 1 and 3 scores significantly different but showed no overall difference. (Author/RC)