Teaching Ethics to High School Students

Working with two teachers and thirty-four high school seniors, the authors developed procedures and assessments to teach ethics in an American high school civics class. This approach requires high school students to discover an agreement or convergence between Kantian ethics and virtue ethics. The authors also created an instrument to measure student achievement in developing a sense of ethics. In this study, a Cronbach's alpha (.89) estimate describes the internal consistency reliability for the instrument. When the authors compared pretest scores with posttest scores (using paired samples) on the student self-rating scale, the data indicated that the increase in achievement was statistically significant, t(57) = 46.796, p = .000 (two-tailed), and d = .52.

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