Evaluation of Moral and Character Education
There are a few character education programs with encouraging evaluation results. The Character Development Project (CDP) has more than 18 years of involvement in several K–6 schools, and in those schools where teachers received staff development and on-site support over 52 percent of the student outcome variables showed significant differences. The Boy Scouts of America developed the Learning For Life Curriculum in the early 1990s for elementary schools. This commercially available, stand-alone curriculum teaches core moral values, such as honesty and responsibility. In a large-scale controlled experiment involving fifty-nine schools, students exposed to the Learning For Life materials showed significant gains on their understanding of the curriculum's core values, but they were also judged by their teachers to have gained greater self-discipline and ability to stay on a task.
Still, evaluation and assessment in character and moral education is best described as a work in progress. The field is held back by the lack of an accepted battery of reliable instruments, a lack of wide agreement on individual or schoolwide outcomes, and by the short-term nature of most of the existent studies. Complicating these limitations is a larger one: the lack of theoretical agreement of what character is. Human character is one of those overarching entities that is the subject of disciples from philosophy to theology, from psychology to sociology. Further, even within these disciplines there are competing and conflicting theories and understandings of the nature of human character. But although the evaluation challenges are daunting, they are dwarfed by the magnitude of the adult community's desire to see that our children possess a moral compass and the good habits basic to sound character.
See also: Character Development; Elementary Education, subentries on Current Trends, History of; Ethics, subentry on School Teaching; School Reform; Secondary Education, subentries on Current Trends, History of.