High school teachers as practitioners and instructors of moral reasoning: A regression model of schemata and pedagogies

As it is an objective within many public school systems to teach morality and develop students' ethical and moral reasoning complexity, and the public considers this objective to be the most important among the other aims of schooling, this study looked at the major approaches to moral education and the resultant pedagogies that are employed by teachers to help their students develop their own ethical decision-making abilities. This objective was to develop some level of understanding both of the effectiveness of various methods to accomplish this objective and of how teachers' personal beliefs and moral operations may influence their practice. This study also looked at the theory of mental schemata and the three major moral reasoning schemata, described with increasing complexity, to describe how it incorporates moral decision-making. The purpose of the research was to find out how the teachers' levels of moral reasoning predicted how effective they would judge the various pedagogies to be in teaching moral thinking. The independent variable was represented by the Defining Issues Test, 2nd edition (DIT2). 68 teachers from southeastern Virginia schools participated in the research, of whom 63 were female and 63 were European-American. It was hypothesized that the complexity of the moral reasoning schemata would predict the perceived effectiveness of the various pedagogies, with the more complex schemata predicting more strongly positive evaluation of those involving internalization of moral reasoning and more strongly negative evaluation of those involving punishment-avoiding and reward-earning moral reasoning. Only two of the pedagogies used were predicted by the teachers' moral reasoning schemata, but there were some definite variations in how the pedagogies were evaluated. The researcher concluded that the teachers' judgments concerning the effectiveness of their pedagogies was not dependent upon their personal moral reasoning, and proposed further research to explore both what elements influence pedagogical choices and what methods specifically lead students to adopt moral reasoning practices.