An Empirical Research On Middle School Students’ Ideological And Moral Qualities

Marxism thinks that human nature is human’s social attribute. It shows that people’s nature does not pursue material life, but to enhance the quality of life and spiritual pursuit of exploring the meaning of life. People’s moral life is a reflection of such a spiritual pursuit. Ideological and moral quality refers to the individual in the process of ideological and moral socialization by way of social education and individual internalization and the formation of its internal basic literacy and psychological quality, which is an important part of individual comprehensive quality, the core and soul of the overall quality of the individual, as a value orientation role in the quality structure of individual. The juvenile to adult transition period, a critical period of moral character, psychological quality and behavior habits, moral quality level during this period ideological level in which students’ physical and mental develop and change rapidly and middle school students’ ideological and moral qualities which are extremely unstable and the plasticity is strong are in forming process, produces great impact on their lives. This study is to objectively understand the current status of-middle school students’ ideological and moral quality, to explore the cause of the problems to students’ ideological and moral qualities, to put forward effective teaching strategies, to provide guidance for the current school moral education reform.This study began with the research on the status quo of the current ideological and moral quality of middle school students,then conducted interviews and surveys to define the meaning of the ideological and moral qualities, discussed the ideological and moral quality evaluation, whether evaluation or not, how to conduct a quantitative evaluation, evaluation theory, stipulated evaluation index system of the students’ ideological and moral qualities, and based on the evaluation, drew up "Middle School Students’ Ideological and Moral Qualities Questionnaire"(a trial version) which includes four one-level dimensions, namely:self-relations, relationships with others, and the relationship between collective and relationship with society. Each one-level dimension includes five evaluation indexes. Among them, self-relational dimension, includes the love of life, self-esteem self-reliance, quest for knowledge, innovation practice, upright and justice; relationships with others dimension includes honesty and trustworthiness, respect for others, honoring parents, helpfulness, tolerance; relations and collective dimension includes collective sense of cooperation, sense of dedication and love for the party and people, patriotic consciousness, peace-loving; the relation with society dimension includes social ethics, rights and obligations and social democracy and legal system, energy saving and environmental protection, and Internet ethics. Then, the author trial test the questionnaire. The trial test results show that only12items have lower discrimination in relation to the first dimension that they belong to and the remaining80items have better discrimination as well as higher reliability and validity. Therefore, the test results can basically meet the main psychometric indices. This indicates that the scientificalness and feasibility of the revised questionnaire that evaluates middle school students’ ideological and moral quality status. It can serve as a tool to measure the ideological and moral qualities of middle school students.Considering the differences of social and economic development in different regions in our country, we extracted representatives from the Zhejiang Province, Hubei province and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, as developed regions, less developed ones, underdeveloped developed ones respectively. The author uses "Middle School Students’Ideological and Moral Qualities Questionnaire"(a revised version), randomly selects more than10,000middle school students from more than30secondary schools in Zhejiang Province, Hubei Province, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and conducts a questionnaire survey as a supplement to the questionnaire, Interview Surveys are conducted on more than200students and more than160teachers from more than30secondary schools in three provinces. The results of the survey show that there are significant gender differences between boys and girls in ideological and moral qualities, The gender differences in junior middle school are higher than senior middle school; girls’ ideological and moral quality is generally higher than boys’; there is a significant grade difference in junior middle school students’ideological and moral qualities, the first grade students’ performance is the highest, the qualities deteriorate as the grade goes higher; the second grade is fine, the third grade is the lowest; there are no significant differences among senior middle school grades. junior middle school’s ideological and ethical standards on the whole are higher than senior middle school’s; there are also significant differences between middle school only-child students and non only-child middle school students, ideological and moral qualities of the only-child of secondary school students are significantly higher than the non-only-child middle school students; there are also significant differences of ’ideological and moral qualities’ in the urban and rural schools. Urban school students’ ideological and moral quality are the highest score, followed by urban-rural-combined schools, with rural schools the lowest; there are also significant differences of ’ideological and moral qualities’ in the regional schools. Developed regions students’ ideological and moral quality are the highest score, followed by less developed regions, with underdeveloped regions the lowest. The survey also discovers that middle school students’ ideological and moral quality score is higher as a whole. In the four one-level dimensions of the ideological and moral qualities, the social relationship dimension has the highest score, followed by the collective relation dimension, then dimension of relationships with others, and self-relation dimension ranks the lowest. As for20two-level dimensions, upright and justice rank the first,followed in scores by love of the Party and the people, then the rights and obligations, peace-loving, democratic and legal system, energy saving and environmental protection, respect for others, the moral of the social ethics, teamwork, Internet ethics, helping others, cherishing life, patriotic consciousness, self-esteem self-reliance, honesty and trustworthiness, honoring parents, tolerance, dedication, knowledge and enterprising, practical innovation. This conclusion of this study reflects the contemporary ideological and moral quality that fits the times development pulse, and the development of the society. This conclusion found that students’ ideological and moral quality that outstands performance for their parents, tolerant, dedication, seeking knowledge, practice and innovation of traditional values has lower scores, but that in upright and justice, loving the party and the people, rights and obligations, loving peace, democracy and the legal system to highlight progress trend of the social development values has higher scores.Based on the findings of the questionnaire and interview survey, the author made a reflection on the problems of the moral quality of middle school students and proposed the following solutions for education. According to gender differences, school, family and society have to implement strategies for gender-based teaching. For the grade differences, the school moral education should focus on the value guidance, abandon the exam-oriented education, remold the goal of education. For the differences and the non-only child, the family should strengthen communication between parents and the child (the children), take the democratic education. According to the different types of differences between urban and rural schools, the government should cancel dual structure barriers between the urban and rural, parents take the responsibility of family education, and the local governments should purify the social environment and network environment. According to the regional differences, we need to increase in the less developed and underdeveloped areas of education inputs, strengthen in-service teachers’ training after working, practice the teachers’ rotational communication system on a regular basis.