The Impact Of Group Counseling Of Value Clarification On Children’s Moral Cognition

Moral cognition is a vital psychological process, which is the growing and developing basis of moral feeling, moral will and moral behavior. As a teaching approach, value clarification is a way for students finally confirming their values through selection, evaluation and action. By the combination of value clarification and group psychological counseling, this study researches its impact on the moral cognition of children who are in the moral transitional period on behalf of 9-year old children.Taking account of the psychological characteristics and the existing moral cognition level of children in the moral transitional period, this study designs a group counseling programs, using the value clarification approaches like clarifying reaction method, the value of continuum, the value of ordering method, as well as the group counseling techniques of active listening, empathy, organized asking, etc. So that children’s moral concepts, moral judgments, and moral will, the specific contents of moral cognition, can be trained and improved.This study, which for the experimental method, selects 63 subjects who were divided into the experimental group and the control group from an elementary school in Changsha. The members of experimental group receive the eight-time group counseling during two months with the moral educational courses of school at meantime. And the members of control group just accept the moral educational courses without the group counseling. Meanwhile, the study has a comparative analysis between boys and girls within the experimental group, which would be helpful to enlighten the group counseling for the children at the moral transitional period.The results showed that:1.The score of moral cognition(C-score) of experimental group which received both of moral courses in school and the group counseling has a significant difference between the pretest and the posttest. The C-score of control group which just received school’s moral courses but no group counseling has non-significant difference.2.The progress of C-score between experimental group and control group has significant difference after the group counseling for experimental group.3.The girls’ average score of moral cognition’s progress is higher than boys’ within the experimental group. But there is non-significant difference between the progress of girls and boys after group counseling.In short, the group counseling of value clarification can improve the level of moral cognition of children in moral transitional period on behalf of 9, and the program of group counseling in this study is effective.