The article discusses the importance of quantitative empirical character assessment for better understanding the formation of character and for promoting virtue and thereby also human flourishing. Attention is given to a number of challenges in developing character survey items along with criteria for evaluating items and examples of successes and…

Ethics education exists in most professions internationally, yet is less prevalent in teacher education. This article reports on research exploring how ethics education is provided in university courses of initial teacher education (ITE) in England that was conducted as the second phase of an international survey study which considered the…

Objective: The Bioethics Teaching in Secondary Education (Project BEST) aims to promote the teaching of bioethics in secondary schools. This paper describes the development and implementation of the programme in Portugal. Design: Programme development involved two main tasks: (1) using the learning tools previously developed by the US Northwest…

As the British expanded their dominions in India, political and administrative needs made it imperative for them to acquire more information about their subjects. Hence, systematic and meticulous surveys began to be commissioned by the East India Company as it assumed charge of educating the natives. These surveys were an integral part of what…

Today's doctor is as much a humanist as a scientist. Medical schools have responded to this change by introducing a variety of courses, most notably those concerning the humanities and ethics. Thus far, no one has examined the extent of use of these subjects in Chinese medical schools. The goal of this study is to determine how many and in what…

This article provides a narrative review of the scholarly writings on professional ethics education for future teachers. Against the background of a widespread belief among scholars working in this area that longstanding and sustained research and reflection on the ethics of teaching have had little impact on the teacher education curriculum, the…

The general practice of civil servant training providers in Hungary is to evaluate their products only through surveying the reaction of participants. The obvious weakness of this practice is that the variance in the level of satisfaction does not necessarily coincide with the positive professional impact that the trainings are aimed to produce.…

With the establishment of the European higher education area (EHEA), the ethical learning of students is a matter of central importance in European universities. This paper examines the current state of ethical learning of students in the Spanish university system. We present the results of a descriptive survey, which used a training model for…

This paper argues that the way future teachers are being initiated into the ethical dimensions of their future profession is largely out of step with the movement to professionalize teaching. After recalling the role that codes of professional conduct play in the ecology of professional self-regulation, and arguing that familiarizing students with…

This study reports belief survey data from 92 preservice teachers responding to questions about the moral work of teaching. Those data reveal that participants commonly express the belief that modeling is a primary means by which moral education occurs. The survey responses are analyzed to show a number of themes regarding the nature of preservice…

This paper provides a snapshot of the current approach to ethics education in accredited Australian pre-service teacher programs. Methods included a manual calendar search of ethics related subjects required in teacher programs using a sample of 24 Australian universities and a survey of 26 university representatives. Findings show a paucity of…

The ethics assessment industry is currently dominated by the second version of the Defining Issues Test (DIT2). In this article, we describe an alternative assessment instrument called the Sphere-Specific Moral Reasoning and Theory Survey (SMARTS), which measures the respondent's level of moral development in several respects. We describe eight…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the engagement and response of students to the teaching of engineering ethics incorporating a macro ethical framework whereby sustainability is viewed as context to professional practice. This involves incorporating a broader conception of engineering than is typically applied in conventional…

In this society where ethical misconduct is prevalent, faculty and staff can do a better job of providing training and encouragement to help students make ethical decisions. At the University of North Carolina Wilmington, a task force was created to develop a workshop for student leaders to enhance their awareness of ethical issues and the…

The purpose of this study is to assess whether bullying behaviors were impacted by the character education curriculum "Character Counts!" in fourth and seventh grade students. More specifically, over time are the perceptions that the students had of bullying behaviors impacted and is there a difference between the perceptions that boys…