Preparing Urban Middle School Teachers to Incorporate Moral Development in Academic Instruction: Student Outcomes

• In Event: Integrating Moral and Social Development Within Middle School Social Studies: A Social Cognitive Domain Approach

Abstract

This paper presents student outcomes from a project preparing middle school history teachers to generate and implement lessons integrating learning of history with promotion of students’ development within the moral, conventional and personal domains (Nucci, 2009).

Sample: A total of 252 students from 11 classrooms in 3 Oakland, California Middle Schools (100 6th grade, 87 7th grade, and 65 8th grade) participated in this study. The majority of these students came from lower to working class ethnic minority communities.

Measures of Development Our assessment of development was based on social cognitive domain theory (Turiel, 2002) distinctions among morality (concepts of fairness, human welfare and rights), social convention (consensually agreed upon norms of a social group), and the personal (issues of individual choice and privacy). We assessed development of social and moral cognition in two ways. First, we conducted a micro-genetic analysis (Paranfes & di Sessa, 2012) of gradual changes in students’ social and moral understandings through students’ written work produced over the course of the academic year in conjunction with lessons participating teachers produced within the project. These microgenetic analyses focused upon changes within the moral and conventional domains and in coordinations across all three domains as students weighed the moral and non-moral issues posed in their written assignments.

Second we conducted formal pre and post-test assessments using essay responses to standardized situations designed to assess reasoning and understandings about social convention (Nucci & Becker, 2004), morality (Nucci & Turiel, 2012), and coordinations of across domains (Nucci & Weber, 1991). This is the first study that has used only domain-theory measures to assess moral development.

Outcomes: Micro-genetic analyses revealed patterns of gradual change across the academic year indicative of growth within each domain and increased capacity to coordinate elements across domains.

Our pre and post assessments of morality and convention indicated that the lessons provided by participating teachers resulted in development in both domains. For brevity only the data for 8th grade is presented here. Post test scores for 8th grade students were significantly higher than pre test for both moral (t = 2.74; p<. 007) and conventional (t = 2.18; p<.02), and were also significantly higher at post-test than the students in the control class (Moral t = 1.93, p <.03; Conventional t = 2.85, P <.003).

Student self-reports also indicated that students in the participating classes learned more about history than did students in the control classes. Our plan is to obtain actual end of year District scores for each history class. However, those data are not yet available.

Conclusions. The assessment of student outcomes indicates that the lessons constructed by teachers integrating attention to moral and conventional elements resulted in cognitive growth in both domains and the capacity to coordinate reasoning across domains. In addition, this positive impact on social and moral development did not result in a loss of academic achievement, but according to student self-reports resulted in greater engagement in the classes and greater learning of history.

Author

• Michael Walden Creane, University of California - Berkeley