'Constructing the test to the teaching' - and the complexities of assessing learning in ethics education

This study draws on a research project where a model of fiction-based ethics education was developed and put into practice during a school year in five classes in compulsory school, two in grade 5 and three in grade 8. A test was constructed with the purpose of evaluating a multi-dimensional ethical competence. The test was given at the beginning and the end of the school year to the students in the five classes, but also to students in five other classes who received the ordinary form of ethics education. The test was constructed by using tasks from earlier Swedish national tests on ethics education, but in this study new assessment instructions were developed. According to this test, almost no significant differences were found between the classes with fiction-based ethics education and the other classes. However, this contrasts with the fruitfulness of the fiction-based model, as identified through other forms of evaluation. The findings raise questions about whether and how ethics education can be meaningfully tested, which in this article is self-critically reflected on. A concluding discussion on target competence, teaching intervention and ways of evaluation - in relation to each other - ends the article. In this study, a fiction-based ethics education (EE) was put into practice during a school year in five classes in compulsory school in Sweden. A test was constructed with the purpose of evaluating a multi-dimensional ethical competence, using tasks from earlier Swedish national tests but with new assessment instructions. According to the test, almost no significant differences were found between the fiction-based EE and the ordinary EE. The article focuses on whether and how ethics education can be meaningfully tested, and stresses the importance of carefully considering the relationships between the target competence, the teaching intervention and the ways of evaluation. The multi-dimensional ethical competence - the target competence - can be relevant in relation to moral practices of everyday life and hence important to teach, but still difficult to test. A fiction-based approach may develop certain dimensions of the target competence, such as moral sensitivity, contextual sensitivity, knowledge of the phenomenon in question, and communication, rather than others, such as moral judgement and motivation, and a more general, principle-based ethical competence. When the test used is based on tasks from the national test, where a general and principled understanding of ethical competence dominates, it might be difficult to grasp the potential of the fiction-based approach. Despite the difficulties in evaluating EE, our conclusion is not that this kind of research should be avoided, but rather that it should be developed further, due to the importance of research-based teaching.