In the first decade of the 21st century, most college faculty members have continued
the centuries-old tradition of complaining that students come to college unprepared to
learn. Thus, as behavioral scientists, we decided to interrupt our complaining in order
to obtain some data for analysis. Because of difficulties encountered in teaching ethics
to criminal justice students, we identified two variables of interest, namely, scores on a
test of moral reasoning and scores on a test of executive functions. The findings from
our pilot study suggest that scores on executive functioning predict a significant
amount of the variance in scores on a test of moral reasoning. This finding suggests
that interventions may be designed to improve students’ academic performance. Since
there is evidence that moral reasoning is a developmental process, it is worth
investigating the possibility that executive functions are best understood as a
developmental process as well.