Character Education

Over the past two decades, schools have demonstrated a renewed commitment to teaching and reinforcing shared prosocial values. This resurgence in character education programs has resulted in changes in public policy, district and school codes of conduct, and teaching practices within schools. Character education is broadly defined as a process of helping children and youth learn and demonstrate shared values.

Character educators use a variety of instructional strategies to meet these educational goals. For example, teachers and students may be asked to focus on a “character trait of the week,” social studies literature and current events may be used during academic instruction to emphasize conduct associated with good character, and students may receive reinforcement or recognition for demonstrating good character-related behavior at school. Advocates believe that character education must be delivered schoolwide and must be intentional, proactive, and designed with long-term social, moral, and academic outcomes in mind.

Public schools are a central place where moral conduct and ideals are taught and promoted. Early textbooks (e.g., McGuffey Readers) were replete with stories that had strong moral overtones. From 1910 through 1930, character education was actively promoted in public schools and students received instruction on moral conduct, were required to recite morality codes, and participated in character clubs both in and out of school settings. During this same period, researchers Hartshorne and May examined the effect of character education programs on the moral conduct of children and youth. Their findings, published in a multivolume series titled Studies in the Nature of Character, suggested that students who participated in character education programs were no more likely to demonstrate moral conduct than those students who did not participate in these programs. Their data suggested that adult inconsistency, use of harsh discipline to control behavior, and overly didactic teaching methods were both commonplace and ineffective strategies for changing conduct in children and youth.

The debate on how to teach and promote moral character changed in the mid-1960s and 1970s, as educators and psychologists adopted school-based practices associated with the values clarification and moral reasoning movements. These practices relied heavily on cognitive-developmental theories and were commonplace in educational settings for more than 20 years. Students who participated in these programs were typically presented with moral dilemmas and asked to consider how they would resolve the presented problems. Teacher influence was limited to facilitating discussion groups and promoting prescribed problem-solving strategies and methods. Research into the effectiveness of these methods suggested that moral reasoning and values clarification curricula did little to change student conduct, and eventually these methods fell out of favor with educators.

Few controlled evaluations have been conducted that examine the effectiveness of character education. Informal studies have focused on measuring changes in knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs of teachers, students, and parents. Anecdotal data from these studies suggest that respondents believe that character education programs have resulted in decreases in discipline problems, increases in problem solving and conflict resolution, and increases in student morale. A review of research on contemporary character education programs indicates that didactic methods alone have little effect on character development, moral reasoning does not result in direct changes in moral conduct, and character formation is a function of the social environment. Proponents of character education have called for increases in controlled evaluations, studies that examine the effect of character education programs across all grade levels (i.e., elementary, middle, and high school), and methods that promote the maintenance and generalization of effects over time and across settings. A small body of research tentatively indicates that changing moral conduct probably includes (a) environments where adults regularly model desired character-related behavior, (b) students experience maximum levels of academic success, and (c) students are directly and formally taught characterrelated social behavior (i.e., social skills instruction).

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