How curricular content and pedagogical strategies affect moral reasoning development in college students

Abstract

College instructors use a variety of approaches to teach students to reason more effectively about issues with a moral dimension and achieve mixed results. This pre‐post study of 423 undergraduate students examined the effects of morally explicit and implicit curricular content and of selected pedagogical strategies on moral reasoning development. Using causal modelling to control for a range of student background variables as well as Time 1 scores, 52% of the variance in moral reasoning scores was explained; we found that these scores were affected by type of curricular content and by three pedagogical strategies (active learning, reflection and faculty‐student interaction). Students who experienced more negative interactions with diverse peers were the least likely to show positive change in moral reasoning as a result of participating in any course. Implications for the design of intervention studies are discussed, including the need to attend to selection and attenuation effects.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Wabash Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts for their generous support of this research.

Notes

1. Information was not collected regarding student motivation to enrol in these courses, but the reasons are likely to vary. For example, the Introduction to Sociology course was a required course for sociology majors, a social science elective for engineering majors or a general elective for psychology majors. Courses were not selected to reflect student characteristics in order to generalise the findings to the student body as a whole (e.g. distribution by major, gender or race).

2. Higher means reflect higher scores on a computed index and a greater likelihood of students' enrolling in courses with moral emphases before participating in the courses examined for this study.