Making ethics teaching more effective with a three step model
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Making ethics teaching more effective with a three step model Hans Teke 1 Accepted: 12 October 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In this study, the impacts of two different “methods” for teaching ethics as part of the religious education in the Swedish upper secondary school were compared by means of a non-randomized controlled trial in two parts, involving 542 students. The question was which “method” had the greatest capacity to generate long-term ethical awareness in the students. The intervention condition consisted of students whose teachers were instructed to teach according to the Three Step Model, a teaching method influenced by research concerning how moral autonomy and ethical awareness could be increased by means of instruction and training. The control condition consisted of students whose teachers were instructed to teach basically as usual but with some added guidelines. During the trial, all students were given a pre-test before the ethics section had started and a post-test 10–12 weeks after it was finished. When quantified and summarized, the results showed an advantage of the intervention condition in measure B (development of demonstrable knowledge) but an advantage of the control condition in measure A (self-assessed ethical awareness); however, the advantage of the intervention condition was clearer and stronger. Even though the intervention students did not experience a stronger development, they appeared to have learned significantly more, not least in terms of procedural knowledge in ethical problem solving. The tentative conclusion is therefore that the Three Step Model is a more effective method for increasing ethical awareness, at least if one defines ethical awareness and measures it the way it was done in this study. Keywords Ethics . Ethics teaching . Didactics . Religious education . Upper secondary
school . Impact study . Long-term effects
* Hans Teke [email protected]
1
Department of Educational Sciences, Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Teke H.
About the study It might be the dream of every person who teaches ethics that the teaching will make an actual difference in the minds of the students, months or even years afterwards; either that they think differently about ethical issues, that they get a wider perspective on right and wrong or even better: that they will make better choices in the face of a moral problem. However, it is not that easy to find out how such long-term effects could be achieved. One way of doing it would be to compare at least two different ways of teaching ethics in this regard and see which one is the most effective. This was done in a large-scale quantitative study, a non-randomized controlled trial, in which an intervention was made in the ethics section of the religious education (a mandatory but nonconfessional subject) in the Swedish upper secondary school (covering the ages 16– 19). The aim of the study was to find out what the most effective way would be to increase the long-term ethical awareness
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