Promoting ethical reasoning, affect and behaviour among high school students: An evaluation of three teaching strategies

Ethics education should aim to promote students' maturity across a broad spectrum of moral functioning, including moral reasoning, moral affect and moral behaviour. To identify the most effective strategy for promoting the comprehensive moral maturity of high school students, we enrolled students in one of four groups: an introductory ethics class, a blended economics-ethics class, a role-model ethics class taught by graduate students and a non-ethics comparison class. Pretest and post-test instruments measured the ways students (a) reason, (b) feel and (c) act with regard to ethical-normative issues. The results indicated that the approaches to teaching ethics varied considerably in terms of their ability to promote significant positive changes in students' moral reasoning, empathy and behaviour.