The Development Of Moral Judgement Religiousness And General Knowledge

Children are not simply molded by the environment; through constant inference and interpretation, they actively shape their own social world. This book is about that process. Elliot Turiel's work focuses on the development of moral judgement in children and adolescents and, more generally, on their evolving understanding of the conventions of social systems. His research suggests that social judgements are ordered, systematic, subtly discriminative, and related to behavior. His theory of the ways in which children generate social knowledge through their social experiences will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in child development and education.

This book presents a number of fundamentally challenging perspectives that have been brought to the fore by the national tests on religious education (RE) in Sweden. It particularly focuses on the content under the heading Ethics. It is common knowledge that many teachers find these parts difficult to handle within RE. Further, ethics is a field that addresses a range of moral and existential issues that are not easily treated. Many of these issues may be said to belong to the philosophical context, in which “eternal questions” are gathered and reflected upon. The first chapters highlight the concepts of ethical competence and critical thinking. In the following chapters the concept of ethical competence is analyzed with regard to teachers’ objectives and to students’ texts, respectively. These chapters pursue a more practice-related approach and highlight specific challenges identified from both teacher and student perspectives. Next, the book raises the issue of global responsibility. What kind of critical issues arise when handling such matters at school? Further, can contemporary moral philosophers contribute to such a discussion? In turn, the book discusses the role of statistical analyses with regard to national tests, while the closing chapters present international perspectives on the book’s main themes and concluding remarks. The book’s critical yet constructive approach to issues regarding assessment in ethics education makes a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate among researchers as well as to the everyday communication on testing in schools and classrooms. As such, it will appeal to scholars in ethics education and researchers in the field of assessment, as well as educators and teachers interested and engaged in the task of testing ethics in school contexts where curricular demands for valid and authoritative evaluation may provide important guidelines, but may also pose challenges of their own.

This volume reviews Kohlberg's stage theory of classifying moral judgment and issues of reliability and validity are addressed.

Moral Development Theories—Secular and Religious introduces readers to 13 secular models and 13d religious theories in a wide-ranging comparative study of the roots of moral development. The secular models include attribution theory, cognitive-structural views, social-learning and social-cognition approaches, Freud's psychoanalysis (plus Erikson and Fromm), Marxist beliefs, a composite theory, Hoffman's conception of empathy, Anderson's information-integration view, Gilligan's gender distinction, Sutherland and Cressey's explanation of delinquency, and Lovinger on ego development. Religious theories represent the Judaic-Christian-Islamic line, Hinduism and derivatives (Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism), Confucianism, Shinto, and four minor theories drawn from the belief systems of the Navajo, Zulus, Vodou adherents, and Okinawans. The description of each theory is designed to answer a common set of questions introduced in Chapter 1. The closing section of each chapter evaluates that chapter's theories in terms of a series of assessment standards described in Chapter 2. The book's final chapter inspects all of the theories from the viewpoint of five desires that people often hold in relation to their conceptions of moral development. The desires are: (a) for immanent justice; (b) to understand the causes of the consequences that result from people's behavior in moral situations; (c) to become immortal; (d) to enjoy a happy life, and (e) to understand the moral-development process in order to help others who need moral guidance.