Preparing Preservice Teachers for Character Education in Urban Elementary Schools: The UIC Initiative

The University of Illinois at Chicago is the largest public university in northern Illinois, and the primary producer of new teachers for the Chicago Public Schools. As such, it is a standard bearer for urban teacher education. As with most colleges of education, the historical lack of integration of character education into the teacher education program at UIC has not been due to resistance to concerns for the moral development of students. Instead, it reflects the primacy that had been placed on preparation to teach basic academic competencies among the preservice teachers of urban children. The commitment to urban education, however, meant that the UIC faculty was already engaged in an approach to teacher preparation that emphasized the values dimensions of teaching, and the moral responsibilities that educators have toward students. Thus, as is likely to be the case in many colleges of education, the UIC effort at moral development and character education described in this article has built on and made explicit the implicit forms of character education already present in the teacher education program.

The UIC approach to urban education places character education within a larger framework that includes engaging our students in a deep understanding of the ethical dimensions of what it means to be an educator in an urban setting. All teaching is an ethical enterprise (Goodlad, Soder, & Sirotnik, 1990). Along with providing novice teachers with the tools of instruction, and the needed information about children’s development, it is essential to challenge the assumptions that aspiring teachers have about the ethical dimensions of their craft, and particularly to sensitize them to the historical and structural dimensions of race and social class that directly impact the lives of the urban students they will be asked to educate (Henry, 1994; Schubert, 1997). This means operating with great sensitivity to harness the idealism of aspiring young people to examine their own assumptions and potential biases, and at the same time preserve and build on the ethical commitments that brought them to a career in the classroom in the first place (Ayers, 2004). Thus, a fundamental aspect of what we included within our approach to character education built on the already present elements of the UIC teacher education program that provided students with philosophical, historical, and sociological information relevant to the task of urban education (Tozer, Violas, & Senese, 2001). This approach to character education accepts the challenge put forward over a decade ago by Kevin Ryan(1989) to see the preparation of teachers capable of engaging in character education as something other than simply a matter of methods courses and teaching technique.

The general context and values of the UIC faculty provided a genial milieu for the construction of a formal and overt programmatic approach to character education within our undergraduate elementary teacher education program. The formal structure of the program is framed by what is referred to as social cognitive domain theory (Turiel, 1983, 1998). Where domain theory offers new insights into moral development and educational practices is in its account of the development of moral and social values. According to domain theory, concepts of social right and wrong are not all of one type, but are organized within distinct conceptual and developmental frameworks. Three basic conceptual frameworks or domains are posited by domain theory: morality, societal convention, and the personal. Concepts of morality address issues of human welfare, rights, and fairness and are constructed out of the child’s early social interactions around events such as unprovoked hitting and hurting that have intrinsic effects upon another person (Turiel, 1983, 1998). Morality (defined in terms of justice, welfare, and rights) can be distinguished from concepts of social conventions, which are the consensually determined standards of conduct particular to a given social group. While morality and convention deal with aspects of interpersonal regulation, concepts of personal issues refer to actions that comprise the private aspects of one’s life, such as the contents of a diary, and issues that are matters of preference and choice (e.g., friends, music, hairstyle) rather than right or wrong (Nucci, 2001). The distinctions drawn within domain theory among moral, conventional, and personal concepts have been sustained by findings from more than 70 studies published over the past 30 years. Comprehensive recent reviews of this research may be found in Nucci (2001), Smetana (2002), and Turiel (1998).

The importance of domain theory for character educators lies in its ability to provide an account for (1) the age-related changes associated with concepts within a given system, (2) shifts in behavior associated with growth within particular domains, and (3) the forms of social interaction or educational input likely to stimulate growth within a given conceptual system. Moreover, in differentiating among moral and nonmoral issues we are able to provide future educators with the analytic tools to address core values of fairness and beneficent treatment of others, rather than conflating such core issues with matters such as dress codes that schools may approach in different ways as a function of local custom and context. Understanding the ways in which morality and convention interact with one another also permits educators to go beyond the development of “nice children” who are compliant followers of the status quo, toward the development of citizens of character prepared to engage in critical evaluation of themselves and the social system they inherit (Nucci, 2001).

Domain theory has afforded our faculty a common language for discussions about morality across disciplinary boundaries. It has also allowed us to move beyond the common sticking points over values differences that emerge from the conflation of social convention with core moral values of fairness and human welfare. Finally, the adoption of domain theory as the organizing framework for our efforts at character education, has allowed us to use a common language with our students across courses, and provides a tool for picking up common threads running throughout the preservice teacher education experience. These would include such things as attention to the social and emotional development of students, awareness of the particular needs and backgrounds of urban learners, and the integration of moral and social values themes through the general curriculum and processes of instruction and classroom management.

Domain theory falls within the broader class of developmental approaches to character education (Berkowitz, 2002; Damon, 2002). Therefore some of the underlying assumptions we incorporate into our teacher education program are similar to those that underlie “best practices” tested over the years in other developmentally based approaches. In particular, we view character education as entailing the development of moral autonomy rather than a process of inculcation of the social norms and values of the status quo. This means that our approach to classroom management and student conduct is consistent with what has been referred to as developmental discipline (Watson, 2003), and an appropriate emphasis on teacher’s use of peer interaction and group processes as a mode of academic instruction. We also view character as the application of moral and social judgment in context, rather than the expression of personal virtues. Thus, our approach emphasizes teacher activities that engage students in reflection and the exercise of moral and social cognition. Finally, we view character education as working hand in hand with the more general processes of social and emotional learning (SEL). At UIC, we are fortunate to have access to the resources of the Collaborative on Academic and Social Emotional Learning (CASEL) and have incorporated SEL activities within our approach to character education.

The incorporation of character education within the UIC teacher education program is an on-going process. In this section we will describe the evolution of the program over a 2-year period. The progress of program changes was captured within the formative evaluation of the project. Two graduate assistants maintained a record of project activities through journals in which they recorded their meetings with the teacher education faculty, and observations of classrooms. In addition to these journals, we developed a record of program artifacts such as course syllabi and course materials. The latter provided a chronology of basic adjustments in course structures and assignments related to character education. Before describing these changes we will provide a quick overview of the basic structure of the elementary education program at UIC.

Prior to entry into the bachelor of arts program in elementary education, students must complete 60 hours of coursework (2 years of study) in the liberal arts and two foundations courses in the College of Education during their final semester (generally sophomore year) prior to admission into the degree program. One of these courses—Child Development and Elementary Education (EPSY 255)—is used to introduce basic information about moral and social development and serves as the springboard for all subsequent work on character education. The evolution of this course and its current structure will be described in detail below. Students are admitted into the program in the fall semester of their junior year pending satisfactory completion of all required coursework, passing the State of Illinois test of basic skills ICTS, evidence of 100 hours of service work with children, two writing samples (one impromptu), and an individual interview with program faculty.

Over the next 2 years, students take courses that focus on the teaching of language arts, math, science, and social studies, as well as teaching of second language learners and children with disabilities. Throughout the 2 years as elementary education majors, students are involved in fieldwork that increases incrementally, culminating in the last semester of student teaching. All fieldwork and student teaching is done in Chicago Public Schools. The urban emphasis of the program means that all courses irrespective of academic content deal with issues of cultural diversity, poverty and linguistic minority status, and the fundamental social justice role of urban teachers. The latter orientation factors into the implementation of character education.

The first phase of the integration of character education into the elementary education program entailed two basic sets of activities. One was to flesh out the social development component of the Child Development and Elementary Education (EPSY 255) course. This required course, taken by students in their first semester of the education program provided us with an ideal context to set the stage for subsequent work on character education.

The second was to engage in dialogue with the teacher education faculty to find points of commonality, and to locate appropriate opportunities for the integration of character education. These two aspects of the first phase of program development will be discussed separately.

For historical reasons that are unlikely to be unique to the UIC program, issues of social development had been generally left to the courses on human development and educational psychology, while the nitty-gritty of teaching, especially of subject matter instruction took place in subsequent courses. Rather than bemoan that division of labor, we set out to buttress the social development component of this initial course in child development, and use the language and activities of that course to establish the context for the integration of character education in all other courses in the program. In order to do this we expanded the amount of course time spent on social and moral development, and fully integrated those aspects of the course with units on student diversity, student motivation, and classroom management. This expansion of coverage of issues of social, emotional, and moral development was achieved through reductions in the amount of time spent on behaviorist theories of learning, and specific attention to content instruction better covered in later courses. Approximately 15% of the total amount of instructional class time was reallocated to character education. This raised to 40% the amount of instructional time devoted to issues of social and emotional learning, moral and social development, and classroom management. This total does not include the 14% of class time devoted to issues of student motivation and cultural diversity, which are also components of social development, but were not the focus of our efforts to revise this particular course. The sequence of weekly topics and readings included within the revised section on moral development and character education are presented in Table 1.

The increased allocation of classroom time is one indication of the shift in emphasis, but does not capture the entire story. We also sharpened the content of what was covered within the units pertaining to character education, and introduced a major new assignment focusing on the integration of character education with the teaching of academic content.

With respect to the content of what gets covered in this course, we moved away from the brief presentation of theories of moral development and research presented in most texts to an in depth focus on domain theory as the organizing framework for thinking about classroom practices aimed at social and moral growth. This is not to say, that we ignored coverage of other perspectives. Students were assigned to read the chapter on moral development and character formation covered in their omnibus textbook (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2002). However, in addition to this textbook coverage of the general topic, students read Education in the Moral Domain (Nucci, 2001), a book that deals specifically with research on domain theory and its application to educational practice. To reduce the amount of required reading, and to engage the students in a cooperative learning practice associated with character education, students worked in teams of five or six to divide up the chapters comprising the assigned reading. Individuals across reading groups who had read the same chapter met to share notes on the content of their particular chapter. The original groups then came together and members taught one another the content of each of the assigned chapters. This jigsaw (Aronson & Patnoe, 1996) reading activity was supplemented through in-class lecture and discussion, as well as a class project that will be described in detail below.

We made a similar decision with respect to classroom management. Rather than limit the treatment of classroom management to an overview of general approaches as covered in the basic textbook (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2002), students were organized in jigsaw cooperative learning groups to master and teach one another the content of parts one and two of Learning to Trust (Watson, 2003) a sourcebook on developmental discipline. Continuity with domain theory was accomplished through connections drawn between practices of developmental discipline, and domain concordant responses to classroom transgressions as described in Education and the Moral Domain. Lectures and discussions of developmental discipline and domain theory were supported by presentations of videos of interviews with children, and video recordings of elementary school classroom interactions, and discussions of moral issues drawn from regular school curricula.

We also increased the amount of student time devoted to character education by adjustments in student assignments done outside of the class. Students worked in groups of six to construct four moral and social values lessons employing regular academic social studies and literacy curricular materials used in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) from Grades 3 to 8. Each group worked with two social studies examples and two literacy reading selections from the grade level they were intending to teach. Students preparing for bilingual classrooms were given the option of working with Spanish language materials. Each group produced at least one lesson focused on a primarily moral issue, one primarily conventional, one overlapping moral and conventional issue, and a fourth issue of their choosing. Lessons were posted on Taskstream a Web-based format that permitted the group members and course instructor to make on-line comments and suggestions throughout the 3 weeks allotted for the assignment.

During year one, we met with the faculty responsible for teaching subsequent courses in the professional development sequence. The first author provided in-services to faculty on recent research on children’s moral and social development, and basic processes for teaching moral and social values. All participating faculty were provided complementary copies of Education in the Moral Domain (Nucci, 2001).

We gathered course syllabi, and reviewed places within each course where there were natural points of convergence between course goals and the infusion of character education. Based on those exchanges we developed supporting materials and activities that could be used in those courses in year two. For example, the authors worked with instructors in courses in social studies and language and literacy to discuss ways in which they might adjust assignments for lesson plans to allow students to integrate attention to moral and social normative issues when appropriate. We shared the materials developed in the Child Development and Elementary Education course that provided instruction in how to identify issues of morality, social convention, or personal prerogative within textbook passages or reading assignments. We worked with faculty to develop handouts to guide students in the construction of discussion questions, role plays, and age appropriate reflective writing assignments that would focus on issues of morality, social norms, and behavioral decisions that arose from content contained within the regular curriculum.

We also collaborated with faculty to make adjustments in the assignments and supporting materials used with field experiences leading up to student teaching. This entailed designing materials to extend the analysis of classroom discourse to include tools to identify domain appropriate and domain inappropriate forms of teacher messages in response to student transgressions (Nucci, 2001). Domain appropriate responses to moral transgressions such as hitting or harsh teasing would focus on the effects of the act “That really hurt Mike’s feelings” or engage the transgressor in perspective taking “How would you like it if Mike had said that to you?” Domain appropriate responses to violations of convention such as talking without raising one’s hand and waiting for the teacher to call on you focus on the social rule or effect the act has on social organization: “Cathy, you are supposed to raise your hand before speaking” and “It is getting too noisy in here. This is a classroom, not the playground.” Domain inappropriate responses would be ones in which a teacher responds to a moral transgression as if it were a convention and vice versa.

The discussions and in-services with faculty, and our work in developing materials were supplemented by a day-long visit to our college in the fall semester by Marilyn Watson who did a formal presentation on developmental discipline for all of our program faculty and students. That presentation was followed up with an in-depth forum on developmental discipline with our program faculty. All participating faculty were provided with complementary copies of Learning to Trust (Watson, 2003).

Year two of the project saw the second iteration of the Child Development and Elementary Education course for the new entering class, along with the implementation of character education components in the subsequent professional education courses. The most substantial shifts took place in the courses on the teaching of reading and in the program field components. Lesson building assignments in the literacy courses were altered to include attention to moral and social values. In some cases this entailed refining and extending the lessons constructed in the earlier Child Development and Elementary Education course. In other cases this entailed constructing entirely new lessons and units.

In their fieldwork courses students were given assignments in which they were asked to observe and reflect on how their cooperating teachers made use of opportunities to infuse character education in the classroom. In one case, the instructor dedicated a number of seminar sessions associated with the fieldwork to focused readings on developmental discipline (Watson, 2003), and showed several video clips on classroom teachers’ responses to student transgressions. These videos provided examples of teachers engaged in practices consistent with developmental discipline and domain appropriate responses to transgressions.

There were two major assignments associated with the fieldwork. These were both designed to heighten students’ ability to analyze classroom discourse. Readings used to guide students’ thinking about these issues included both traditional classroom discourse analysis literature (e.g., Green, Weade & Graham, 1988; Shuy, 1988) as well as teacher-researcher approaches to classroom discourse (e.g., Cazden, 1988; Pappas & Zecker, 2001). These readings served as a complement to the information students had received about developmental discipline, and the handouts faculty had developed to guide students’ analyses of domain concordant responses to student transgressions. The first student assignment entailed recording classroom dialogues in their field settings and then analyzing the extent to which the cooperating teacher’s responses to student transgressions employed discourse that was domain concordant. The second assignment was exactly the same type of analysis on a lesson that each student conducted with the public school students.

The second year of the program also included student teaching. Students from field course sections that had implemented the new character education components were encouraged by their student teaching faculty supervisors to implement developmental discipline and domain theory-based integration of character education within their subject area teaching. The remaining sections completed their student teaching without any specific encouragement with respect to character education. Roughly 1 month into their student teaching experience, Marilyn Watson made a second visit to the campus and did an interactive presentation with all of the students in the senior year of our program.

We took two main approaches to assess program impact. One was to generate a qualitative sense of the degree to which the character education initiative impacted faculty behavior and student response to the teacher education program. There were two primary sources of evidence for impact on faculty: (1) active involvement in the initiative, and (2) alterations in course syllabi or course activities.

Evidence of student reaction to the infusion of additional character education content within coursework was obtained through student course evaluations of Child Development and Elementary Education. We focused on this course because it had the most extensive alterations in the syllabus and course assignments. Student evaluations and commentaries were obtained for the moral and social values lesson activity, the unit on social emotional learning, the unit on developmental discipline, and the overall course evaluation.

The second approach was to obtain an estimate of program impact on our students. This was done through administration of questionnaire assessments to students to evaluate (a) their knowledge of children’s social and moral development, and character education practices, and (b) their sense of efficacy as character educators.

Our initial design for the latter assessment called for a control group comprised of students who had graduated from the program spring semester 2004. These students would not have experienced any of the shifts in the program begun in the fall of 2003. As things turned out, we were able to add a second yoked control group comprised of students who were in course sections taught by faculty who, because of glitches in course scheduling, were not participants in the character education initiative. These faculty had intended to participate in the program. Thus, they comprised a set of faculty who were in all other respects comparable to the faculty who were program participants. This permitted us to assess the efficacy of meeting the goals of character education by simply bolstering the sections on moral and character education in the foundations course in educational psychology, versus carrying the exposure to work on character education throughout the teacher preparation program.

The UIC undergraduate program is structured within cohorts. All students who began the program fall, 2003 received the Child Development and Elementary Education course. Thus all students in the program evaluation received the increased exposure to information about children’s social and moral development that was added into this key first-year course. Following the child development course, students were assigned to five cohorts: three of these cohorts were with instructors who participated in the initiative; two were in cohorts that did not.

To summarize, the program evaluation had two components: (1) a qualitative record of changes in course syllabi and faculty participation, along with student evaluations of the character education component of the child development course; (2) exit questionnaires of student knowledge and efficacy. The latter assessment included a control group comprised of recent graduates; a yoked control group comprised of two sections of students who experienced the altered version of the course Child Development and Elementary Education, but who did attend subsequent courses or field experiences that emphasized character education; an experimental group comprised of three sections of students whose coursework and field experiences were all tied into the character education initiative.

The instrument used to assess student knowledge and efficacy, the UIC Moral Development and Education Questionnaire contained two parts. A final section allowed us to gather basic demographic information about our students and was not part of the program assessment. The first part titled: Moral Development and Education Assessment was comprised of 14 multiple-choice questions that asked about basic knowledge of moral development and educational practices. The questions were similar in content to ones that had appeared on exams in the child development course. Thus, they were tailored to the specific emphasis in the UIC program on social cognitive domain theory. An internal consistency analysis of the scale revealed a Cronbach’s Alpha of .65.

The second section of the instrument was the Moral Development and Character Education Belief Instrument. This scale was adapted from the teacher efficacy instrument developed by Milson (Milson, 2003; Milson, & Mehlig, 2002). The adapted form of the measure contains 32 questions that get at how confident or prepared the respondent feels when it comes to teaching children for moral development and character. The questions refer to beliefs about classroom management practices, teacher and parent influences on children, and the teacher’s impact on children through the curriculum. Participants respond to these questions using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). Items are counter balanced in their wording to control for a positive response bias. Some items on the instrument were adapted from their initial socialization language to be consistent with the constructivist orientation of the UIC program. For example item 7 in the Milson (2003) instrument: “I know how to use strategies that might lead to positive changes in students’ character.” was changed to: “I know how to use strategies that might lead to changes in students’ concepts of fairness and concern for others.” Other items were inserted to reflect the particular emphases in the UIC program on domain theory and developmental discipline. Examples would be item 10: “I feel unprepared to use violations of classroom procedural rules as a context in which to develop students’ understanding and appreciation of social conventions,” and item 27: “Encouraging students to resolve moral disputes in school results in children who will be better able to resolve moral conflicts outside of school.” The internal consistency of this revised version of instrument (Cronbach’s Alpha .90) was similar to that reported by Milson (2003).

Control group responses to the UIC Moral Development and Education Questionnaire were obtained by mail from graduates of the bachelor of arts program in elementary education, spring 2003. Mailings were done in the summer months using addresses available to the College of Education Office of Student Services. Graduates were sent a cover letter, a consent form, and a copy of the instrument to be returned in a prepaid envelope. A total of 61 mailings were sent. However, by the time of the mailing only 42 of the addresses proved to be valid. Follow-up phone calls were attempted, and 31 graduates were reached in this way. A total of 25 students (59.5% of those with accurate contact information) returned completed questionnaires.

Students in the experimental and control groups filled out the instrument in their student teaching seminars in the next to the last class session. A portion of this class session had been set aside by the college as a time to obtain student program evaluations. Thus, the instrument employed in the present study fit within the normal routine of the college program. Consent forms were obtained from students prior to distribution of the instrument. All students in the classes gave their consent and completed the questionnaires. A total of 85 students (53 experimental; 32 yoked control) completed the instrument.

All faculty members involved in the undergraduate elementary education program were invited to participate in the initiative. No one expressed disinterest or objection to the effort to integrate character education throughout the program. Moreover, no one objected to the use of domain theory as the organizing framework for the program. Nearly everyone found it compatible with their own views of children’s development. This was despite the fact that as a research faculty, there was a diversity of opinion regarding the precise meanings of terms such as morality or character, as well as diversity surrounding exact practices for engaging in character education. Despite these differences, the overarching commitment to constructivist and student centered approaches to teaching meant that what differences might have existed among faculty were not an obstacle to program implementation. Seven faculty members took an active role in the program. Three of them were core faculty who handled the fieldwork and student teaching components of the program. The cohort selections for the designation of the experimental groups was based around those three core faculty members.

By the second year of the program, character education components had been integrated within the following courses: Child Development and Elementary Education, Foundations of Literacy Learning and Teaching, Reading and Writing Through the Elementary Grades, Social Studies and Literature in the Elementary Grades, Fieldwork in Elementary Education and Student Teaching. The only required courses in the program that did not insert a character education component were: Teaching and Learning of Mathematics, Teaching and Learning of Science, and Characteristics of Exceptional Children. Typical changes entailed the adjustment of assignments. For example, language arts lesson plans included lessons that identified and focused upon moral and social conventional issues, thus building from the activities initiated in the course on child development.

In the prestudent teaching seminar, the class assignments/fieldwork projects were dramatically and qualitatively different than in previous years. Most students evidenced an increased sensitivity toward issues of character education, and usage of domain theory constructs to reflect on classroom interactions. This became even more apparent in their reflections during student teaching. At seminar, most notably, there were frequent references to their earlier coursework in educational psychology as well as the subsequent readings and lectures on developmental discipline. In the example that follows, a student teacher illustrated how she wove her understanding of the importance of establishing a good atmosphere before she began the lesson. Further on she analyzed how the notion of empathy is a conscious decision she made prior to the lesson implementation.

Later, she continued with a discussion of how her knowledge of domain theory constructs entered into her lesson and interpretations of her students’ reactions. The lesson was designed to develop her students’ persuasive writing skills. Thus, her description also illustrated the basic principle of integrating moral and character education into the regular academic curriculum rather than as a separate aspect of the school day. In many cases our students’ employed formal assigned readings to accomplish these objectives. For example one student teacher employed An Na’s (2001)A Step From Heaven to engage her fifth-grade class in a lesson on social convention and social structure. In the example that follows, however, this teacher’s moral lesson made use of children’s direct experiences to discuss the moral issues associated with eating the Thanksgiving turkey.

In addition to the observed changes in course syllabi, supporting materials, and student products, we attempted to gauge program impact through student evaluations of the character education components that had been added to the Child Development and Elementary Education course. Student course evaluations obtained from of Child Development and Elementary Education are presented in Table 2. Students provided ratings on a 5-point scale where 1 is the lowest and 5 the highest rating. The scores represent combined averages obtained for all sections of the course (a total of 85 students) taught by three different instructors. As can be seen in Table 2, the course itself receives very high ratings M = 4.00, SD = .69. A series of t tests for related samples revealed that two of the character education components were rated as high or higher than the overall course rating. The unit on developmental discipline was rated significantly higher than the course as a whole M = 4.34, SD = .73; t (58) = 4.29, p - < .001. The ratings of the moral and social values lesson activity were not significantly different from the course as a whole M = 4.16, SD = .71, but were significantly lower than the ratings given to the unit on developmental discipline t (58) = 2.13, p - < .05. The scores provided for the unit on social emotional learning, however, were significantly lower than each of the other character education course components as well as the overall ratings given to the course M = 3.55, SD = .91; t (58) = 3.79, p - < .001 (for comparison with the course). These results indicate that with the exception of the SEL unit, students responded well to the course components focusing character education.

Student scores on the Moral Development and Education Assessment are summarized in Table 3. Two of the experimental groups took the assessment together resulting in a total of five groups in the analysis. A one-way ANOVA comparing the control, yoked control and experimental groups revealed a significant overall effect for group F(4, 105) = 5.82, p < .001. Post hoc analyses employing the Tukey HSD revealed no significant differences in knowledge scores between the two yoked control groups, and no significant difference in knowledge scores between the two experimental samples. There were also no significant differences between the control group and either of the yoked controls. Thus, there was no significant impact in the knowledge of students who graduated prior to the character education initiative, and those students who had the enriched course in child development without the subsequent follow-up in character education content in their subsequent field courses or student teaching. However, both experimental groups scored significantly higher than the control group (all ps < .01).

Table 4 summarizes student scores on the Moral Development and Character Education Belief Instrument. A one-way ANOVA comparing the control, yoked control, and experimental groups revealed a significant overall effect for group F(4, 105) = 3.86, p < .01. As was the case with the assessment of knowledge, post hoc analyses (Tukey HSD) revealed no significant differences in efficacy scores between the two yoked control groups, as well as between the two experimental samples. Also as had been the case with respect to knowledge there were also no significant differences in efficacy scores between the control group and either of the yoked controls. Both experimental groups attained significantly higher efficacy scores than the control group (all ps < .05).

In this article we have recounted the implementation and short-term outcomes of one attempt to integrate moral and character education within the preservice preparation of undergraduate elementary teacher education majors. The results of that experience indicate that one can successfully incorporate preparation to teach character education within an already existing teacher preparation program. We were able to adjust course syllabi and student field experiences in ways that were consistent with the broader goals of the teacher education program. Student course evaluations and outcome measures of student knowledge and efficacy indicated that the changes brought about in the program were well-received by the preservice teacher education majors, and effective in raising their knowledge of moral development and educational practice, and self-perceptions of their preparedness to engage in character education. We will now discuss these outcomes in some greater detail and offer suggestions for future research.

With respect to our impact on the teacher education program, the coordinated effort to integrate character education resulted in a substantial increase in the amount of time students spent dealing with issues of social and emotional development, and specific pedagogy related to classroom practices associated with social and moral growth. These program changes were guided by a specific theory and research-based account of social and moral growth, and therefore resulted in a set of coherent messages and associated activities experienced by students as they progressed through the teacher education program. Student evaluations of the character education components of the Child Development and Elementary Education course indicated that students readily accept, and rate highly those components that dealt with moral and social development and character education. The one exception was the unit dealing with classroom practices for social and emotional learning. The particular unit we used was based on examples described within a formal pullout program. Written comments from students included in their course evaluations indicated that the low ratings reflected the students’ concerns that the pullout approach was disconnected from the regular curriculum, and thus viewed by them as having less relevance than the infusion approaches taken with the other aspects of character education they had been introduced to in the course.

By the second year of the project all but three of the required courses provided some degree of exposure to moral and character education. These included the field-based courses and student teaching. Achieving this degree of coherence and program integration depended on three factors.

1. Availability of faculty expertise in moral development and character education to provide the theoretical and empirical framework for the program. In this case the expertise came from a professor of educational psychology (the first author) whose area of scholarship is children’s moral and social growth.

2. Coherence between the theoretical framework guiding moral education, and the goals and assumptions about pedagogy maintained by the broader teacher education program. The Conceptual Framework of the UIC College of Education defines its approach to teaching in constructivist and student-centered terms, and anchors its mission in critical inquiry and the furtherance of social justice. These basic philosophical assumptions were compatible with the social cognitive domain theory underpinnings of the approach to character education. It is unlikely that a more traditional version of character education would have been similarly embraced by the faculty at this institution.

3. Support of the college administration. The dean of education at UIC took an active role in encouraging faculty to participate in the program. This included financial support for faculty in-services during summer months. It is unlikely that the changes witnessed in the 2 years of this project would have occurred without the support of the college dean.

The results of our program evaluation surveys indicated that the program had a statistically significant impact on preservice teachers’ knowledge and their sense of efficacy with respect to the implementation of character education in the classroom. As reported in prior work (Milson, 2003), this sense of efficacy is predictive of classroom teachers’ success in implementing teaching practices. The present study did not include follow-up measures of teacher behavior subsequent to graduation from the program. Thus, we can not state with any certainty that our graduates have translated what they have learned in the course of the teacher education program into character education practices in their current teaching. We have anecdotal evidence from observations of a small number of graduates that they are indeed continuing to employ the character education practices they evidenced during student teaching. However, any definitive conclusions regarding the impact on classroom practices will have to wait for follow-up research.

Perhaps the most interesting result of our exit questionnaires is that the impact on student knowledge and efficacy occurred only among those students whose program experiences included exposure to character education throughout their program, rather than being limited to the child development course. This occurred even though the child development course spent a substantial amount of time on issues of moral and social development, and included practical experience in lesson creation. This raises serious questions about the standard reliance on a single course, such as educational psychology, to achieve an impact on student capacity for character education. One factor that may mitigate against this conclusion is that the control conditions did not include students receiving no exposure to moral development and character education in their coursework. All UIC students have received some exposure to moral development and character education in their educational psychology courses going back at least 2 decades. Nonetheless, the findings of this program evaluation are consistent with Lickona’s (1993) admonitions regarding the complexity entailed in providing character education, and indicate that there is considerable value in the full integration of moral development and character education throughout teacher preparation.

We have already alluded to the need to conduct follow-up research on the effectiveness of our teacher education program on our graduates’ actual classroom practices. Our observations of a small number of recent graduates have been promising. However, systematic research is needed to explore this issue. In addition, we need to extend our program alterations to include the behaviors of our cooperating teachers who are providing the role models for classroom practices for students during field work and student teaching. With the dean’s support we have begun providing in-services to our cooperating teachers. However, this set of activities needs to be expanded.

In sum, the results of this program to integrate moral development and character education within preservice teacher preparation has been largely positive. Participating faculty and students have evaluated the program positively. Exit surveys have indicated that the program has been effective in raising graduates’ knowledge about moral development and character education practices, and has raised student self-efficacy with respect to the engaging in character education. Further work is needed exploring efforts at other colleges and universities to determine if this is a site specific accomplishment or something that can be readily replicated. The initial success of this program bodes well for such future efforts.