Students' Rule Learning And Its Guidance

The rules in our life can be divided into moral,conventional,and personal rules,which correspond to moral,conventional,and personal domains.Based on social cognitive domain theory,this article explores how teachers instruct students to make appropriate judgments on different rules and coordinate multi-domain cognition to do reasoning.The main research methods are questionnaire survey and experimentation.This research chose a class in the eighth grade of a middle school in Shanghai as a test subject.Using a self-made questionnaire to test students' cognitive traits on the severity assessment of violations of rules,the reasons for judgment,the consistency of the rules/authorities,and the universality of the rules.Based on the analysis of the pre-test and the textbook of moral education in grade 8,the author wrote questions that could encourage students to think in different domains,then the teacher guided them to discuss questions in the class and asked them to record their answers after class as homework.The homework analysis shows that students can make domain-consistent reasoning when view moral,conventional,and personal rules.In the process of integrating domain cognition,students show three different tendencies:emphasis on a certain domain,partial coordination of domains,and fully coordination of domains.After half a semester,to compare students' changes before and after and verify the effectiveness of teacher's instruction,the author used the same questionnaire to test students.Comparison about pre-test and post-test shows that: students have made slight progress in the rule judgment;as for rule reasoning,the consistent with the domains has been reduced in the corresponding events,and moral reasoning has increased in the conventional and personal events.In the personal event,moral reasoning was significantly increased(P=0.01<0.05)and personal reasoning was significantly reduced(P=0.01<0.05).The results show that the teacher's guidance improved eighth-grade students' ability to judge different rules,but did not promote them to make domain-consistent reasoning,they applied moral reasoning more to the conventional and personal domains,changes in the personal domain were particularly evident.This paper points out the reasons why students exhibit unexpected changes in rule reasoning.The interactions among moral,conventional,personal domains and the informational assumptions influence students' reasoning.The teaching objectives,contents,and methods of moral education course make students more inclined to use moral reasons in reasoning.In addition,eighth graders are in the "turbulent period" of personal domain,and their personal domain is changeable and unstable.They are constantly conflicting in the process of development,and often fluctuate between two viewpoints,which makes them produce significant changes in the personal event.