A growing number of Americans believe that the public schools have a responsibility to include moral education in their curriculum; and, in fact, 31 states are currently offering courses aimed at teaching students some aspect of traditional values in the expectation of producing concerned citizens who will preserve our democarcy. Each moral…

The nature of the developmental shift from adolescence to adulthood has been of ongoing interest to researchers studying the development of socio-moral cognition from within the "cognitive-developmental" paradigm. This paper identifies three dimensions along which developmental changes in socio-moral cognition occur during late…

Three basic approaches to discipline and child care are the obedience-oriented/punitive, the indulgent/permissive, and the person-enabling/justice approaches. The obedience-oriented/punitive approach, primarily concerned with obedience, sometimes uses praise and rewards manipulatively. When they fail, coercive punishment is used. The…

For the Seneca Indian child the coming of the New Year brings a "visitor" who questions his parents about the child's behavior during the past year. (JC)

Durkheim's treatment of the nature of morality and of moral education is examined. Three elements in his moral theory, namely the spirit of discipline, attachment to social groups, and autonomy or self-determination, are examined in turn and discussed. (Editor)

Three classes of baccalaureate nursing students were administered the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values as part of a longitudinal study, the four times during their three year course of study. The results indicate a decline in Religious Value and an increase in Aesthetic Value. (Author/EK)

Examines the relationship between the level of moral development, (as conceptualized by Piaget), and children's appreciation of humor. (DP)

This paper reports two studies designed to investigate the relationship between conceptions of distributive justice and perspective taking in preschool children. Subjects in the first study were 39 white, middle-class 4- and 5-year-old children. They were administered a concrete object form and an abstract picture form of a perceptual role-taking…

Effects of observing differentially generous models, instructional constraint, and age on private and public charitability were assessed with 192 fourth and fifth grade girls, who engaged in a concept formation task which provided them with money. Implications for social learning theory and for moral development are discussed. (Author/CS)

Education is not a respected profession because educational practice is not based on a solid body of scientific research and theory. Education is at a prescientific or early scientific stage of development. Attempts by educators to base their practice on behavioral science fail because behaviorism encompasses only a narrow segment of human…

Q-sort methodolgy was used to examine the ethical and moral set of 61 professional journalists. The journalists completed a three-part instrument measuring their responses to ethical situations faced by newspeople, their underlying orientations, and their belief systems. Responses to the first part of the instrument yielded three profiles: Type A,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which children's moral judgment of aggressive acts varies by grade level, sex, race, and two dimentions of situational context -- namely, the type of aggression and the presence and type of mitigation. Subjects were 24 first grade and 24 sixth grade students. Within each grade level there were…

In this paper a recent critique of Kohlberg's cognitive-developmental approach to morality by Krutines and Greif is examined in detail. The critique is found to contribute some useful indications of needed study. However, a careful analysis of the literature on moral development shows the criticisms to be largely unfounded, in several cases…

A group of 45 undergraduates discussed a moral issue with a confederate who had the same opinion (no-controversy) or opposite opinion (controversy). Subjects in the controversy conditions were induced to have a high level of defensiveness by a disconfirmation of personal competence or a low level of defensiveness by a confirmation. Subjects in…

Findings of this 20-year longitudinal study support Kohlberg's theoretical predictions of invariant structural consistency of subjects' responses to hypothetical moral dilemmas. Subjects were 58 American males chosen in 1955 according to age, social class and sociometric status. They were 10, 13, or 16 years of age at Time 1. Half of each age…