Quantifying the Moral Dimension. New steps in the implementation of Kohlberg’s method and theory

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Fedor Kozyrev. Quantifying the Moral Dimension. New steps in the implementation of Kohlberg’s method and theory

Foreword

Introduction to English edition

1. Constructivism in the practice of pedagogical research

2. ONYX: A new moral judgment test

2.1. Historical background

2.2. Scientific rationale: what do we measure?

2.3. Description and distinctions

2.4. Results of calibration and standardisation

2.5. Practical recommendations

Appendix 1

3. ONYX in practice: a complex study of the moral and intellectual skills of adolescents

3.1 Aims, sample and method

3.2. Results of the Q-sorts

3.3. Results of ONYX and interviews

3.4. Gender, intellect and education as moral development factors

3.5. Interrelationship of moral characteristics

3.6. Correlation of intellectual and moral development

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

4. Theoretical output: Kohlberg’s model revisited

Literature

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This compact work tells of an enterprise bold in both its subject and its design. Its focus on morality places this project in linear descendancy from the interest of the ancients in education for moral living and civic virtue. It also connects it back to the western Enlightenment’s quest for knowledge of moral truths, and to the subsequent internalisation of the subject with 20th century psychology’s exploration of the moral consciousness of the individual and the development of that consciousness from childhood. The subject of moral education has a rich background. Looking forward, it has also acquired a new urgency as the dizzying speed of technological, scientific developments and startling changes in our environmental, public health, demographic, economic and political contexts make for a complex present and uncertain future. We may not know what world we are preparing our young people for, but it is perhaps more important now than ever before to examine principles for reasoning and action that will hold good in the face of unforeseen challenges and hitherto unimaginable possibilities.

The interest of this work is practical. Its aim is to present something of application and benefit to existing educational contexts, and so it is not the place for philosophical first-principles theorisation. Rather it straight away aligns itself with constructivist pedagogies. Morality is treated as a process, as an operation. While acknowledging that it is inevitably a simplification, the author nevertheless adopts for its usefulness, the measurement of progress in a subject’s ability for moral judgment as an indicator of the development of moral consciousness. Where that moral consciousness and judgment is deemed to be of great significance to the individual’s negotiation through the world and the right ordering of that world, then the assessment of young people’s progress towards that consciousness, and of the effectiveness of educational systems in promoting that consciousness, becomes important. This brings us to the boldness of the method presented in this work.

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The softer branch of constructivism tends toward the pole of the humanities. It borrows from the humanities-style idiographic set of ideas its focus on the concrete and unique, the idea of the hermeneutic circle, its contextual approach to the interpretation of data, its concern about the problem of the compliance of the researcher’s and respondent’s «horizons of interpretation’ and their belonging to one and the same «language game’. The construct in this version is regarded as a personal narrative rather than a scheme, and group patterns play the roles of «meta-narratives’ (Lyotard), shared within (sub) cultures and responsible for the formation of «narrative identities’ (Ricoeur). As the language of mathematics is not suitable here it is substituted with the language of narration, hence models are replaced by plots and the roles of formula are often played by metaphors. Yet general constructivist commitment to analysis stays alive and takes in the idiographic frame of reference, a form of preference for ipsative scales. The diversity and the uniqueness of personal narratives obstruct significantly the perspective of finding general regularities and orient the researcher toward the ideal of better understanding as promoted by the Dilthey’s project of structural psychology. At the same time a matured hermeneutical tradition with its notion of prejudices directs the researcher toward recognition of socio-cultural conditionality of psychic phenomena and makes constructivism more successful than structuralism in this respect.

For constructivism its position on the border between humanities and positive sciences is a stimulus for innovative activity in its methodology. Here it can build on the ideas of cybernetics and synergetics, of information theory and the theory of systems, of semantics and semiotics, of theoretical and applied linguistics, of non-parametrical statistics and of other new fields of study generated in the space of interdisciplinary integration. Of special interest here are the methods that allow the detection, identification and quantification of hidden factors and parameters as soon as they are the primary focus of constructivism itself. Activity and integrity are the first among the parameters that are a-priori ascribed to constructs. One of the first attempts in the pre-paradigm history of constructivism to try the constructivist idea of measuring psychic properties belongs to J.-F. Herbart. He has chosen the intensity of perceptions as the parameter for detection. He relied on activity, the first of the two basic characteristics of constructs Modern constructivism does not abandon this perspective. The rigidity/permeability of constructs (Kelly) that can be measured in the series of subsequent tests is but one example of such a dynamic characteristic. However, the mainstream of constructivism today has taken another direction connected to the measurement of another parameter – that of integrity. This turn was dictated by the revolution in computer facilities that provided an ordinary researcher with unprecedented and almost unbelievable opportunities for the statistical processing of data. These enabled the realisation of the above-mentioned strategy of data reshuffling and the reconstruction of the psyche in the form of «digital moulds’. Figuratively speaking, if a researcher of former times was given a million pieces to make one big image he would probably doubt whether his life would be long enough for completing this puzzle. Today the researcher has an opportunity to hand over this task to a machine that will resolve the task in a couple of minutes. Some of these new technologies, such as factor analysis, were imported by constructivism from other scientific schools. Some came out of its own workshops. Tests on moral capacities (the main topic of this book) belong mostly to the second category.

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