The highest form of virtuous behavior in the Aristotelian virtue ethics approach to character education involves practical wisdom, or "phronesis," which allows an individual to act in the right way about the right things for the right reasons. Here, we use our experiences with social-emotional and character development (SECD) in…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether justifying one's own social knowledge (moral, societal, psychological) toward complex social-moral issues through collaborative argumentation was associated with the improvement of social perspective taking for elementary students. A total of 129 5th graders (52% female, Mage = 10.98) from six…

One of the overarching problems of the world today is that too many people see themselves as dominating other groups of people, and dominating nature. That is a root problem. And thus part of a core solution builds from Kohlberg's commitment to a universal moral orientation, though extended to include not only all people but the more-than-human…

This study examined the application of Lesson Study for professional development (PD) for a domain approach to moral education. A comparison was drawn between the effects of Lesson Study with 17 teachers and 144 students representing middle schools in the same district as a prior study employing intensive traditional PD. In Lesson Study, groups of…

Justice is at the center of many definitions of character across various lines of research, yet there is little empirical research on how the justice of contexts can foster character virtues. The current study draws from a sample of 1,865 Brazilian fourth and fifth graders across two time points in 60 schools (42.7% White; 48.3% male). A…

The purpose of the present study was to explore the issue of a perceived lack of cohesion in moral education in mainland China, and place it in an international academic context, by comparing three student cohorts: grade three and grade six in Primary School and the third year in Junior High School. The study employed mixed research methods;…

This mixed-methods study is an exploration of fifth and sixth grade students' interactions with an online game called "Quandary," a comic-book-esque game aimed at stimulating ethical decision-making. Building on the domain-based moral education framework, researchers designed and implemented a short-term intervention in three classrooms…

Restorative justice pedagogies, such as dialogue or peacemaking circles, allow students to learn how to share and listen with peers, set boundaries for moral dialogue, and engage constructively with each other's perspectives. This study is part of a larger project focused on teachers' professional development and circle implementation. The focus…

Eleven teachers and 254 urban middle-school students comprised the sample of this study examining the social and moral development outcomes of the integration of social cognitive domain theory within regular classroom instruction. Participating teachers were trained to construct and implement history lessons that stimulated students' moral…

Two influential tragic incidents in 2011 are discussed in connection with the cultivation of morality in Japan. One is the suicide of a junior high school student due to bullying in his school--a scandal which eventually led to the country's redefinition of the status of moral education in the school curriculum. The other is the huge earthquake…

The e-character education (e-CE) approach refers to systems of ethics education that pertain specifically to cyberspace. This exploratory study used a survey to collect 2495 teachers' responses regarding virtues important to e-CE. Furthermore, in order to identify the teaching concerns associated with these most important virtues, this study used…

Sixty years after the International Military Tribunal opened in Nuremberg to try "major war criminals", how should soldiers learn not to follow clearly illegal or unconscionable orders? Following the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, judges during the Nuremberg Trials rejected defendants' efforts to avoid punishment on the basis of…