The development of moral orientation in elementary school children

Children's Moral Orientation: does the gender of dilemma character make a difference?

“…However, to date there has been little indication that such gender differences might exist before adolescence. In fact, two studies with elementary school students indicated that both boys and girls showed a slight preference for solutions involving the care orientation (Garrod et al, 1990;Garrod & Beal, 1993).…”

“…In particular, the observation that mothers encourage warm, close and emotionally responsive relationships with daughters, but foster independence, detachment and exploration in sons, leads to the prediction that gender differences in moral orientation might well be established early in childhood. Thus far, one difficulty with adequately evaluating this prediction has been the lack of an appropriate task for children; the Kohlberg dilemmas involve content that is far from children's experience and concerns, and not all children are easily able to think of or discuss a significant real life moral problem (Garrod et al, 1990). …”

“…In order to investigate these possibilities, two experiments were conducted with third grade children (8-year-olds). This age was selected because prior work has shown that the children are cognitively advanced enough to consider and evaluate both orientations, allowing us to examine the potential effects of character gender on which moral orientation is suggested first and which is selected as the best solution (Garrod et al, 1990;Garrod & Beal, 1993).…”

No Man’s Land: Exploring the Space between Gilligan and Kohlberg

“…Pratt et al (1988) found gender differences to be quite marked between active parents though not between non-parents, but other studies found not even those age moderated gender differences in moral orientation (Craft, 1992;Galotti et al, 1991;Garrod et al, 1990;Pratt et al, 1991) Gilligan thinks people prefer either care or justice reasoning so a high level of consistency by an individual in manifesting this preference is expected. Gilligan and Attanucci (1988) reported two-thirds of participants showing only one orientation during discussion of a self-generated moral dilemma, Langdale (1986) reported 87%.…”

Cheating: reflections on a moral dilemma

“…These moral orientations have been identified in people's thinking about real-life moral dilemmas (Gilligan & Attanucci, 1988;Lyons, 1983) and in thinking about fables (Johnston, 1988;Garrod et al, 1990) and I have begun to explore how these moral orientations might be useful in teachers' thinking about the interaction that occurs in their classroom (Johnston, in press). The opportunity to explore how these psychological constructs might influence my own thinking about my teaching occurred in a class I teach, Moral Development and Education.…”