International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Volume 1, Number 2, 2007
Return to current issues pageResearch Article
Abstract
Developing and Assessing Undergraduate Students’ Moral Reasoning Skills
"What does deep ethical understanding look like and how can we measure the progression of this aptitude?" Qualitative and quantitative data collected from students in Contemporary Moral Problems courses over two successive semesters revealed that the development of moral reasoning skills is a slow process. The progression of moral reasoning does not occur in a linear fashion nor is there a point at which a person will have satisfied all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for good moral reasoning. Student artifacts collected present moral reasoning skills as more of an ebb and flow, a type of coherence model with ongoing adjustment of one’s beliefs, moral principles, values, and factual information.
View Full ArticleBio
Karen Hornsby
North Carolina A&T State University
Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
kLhornsb@ncat.edu
As an assistant professor of philosophy at North Carolina A&T State University, I teach undergraduate courses in ethics, logic, religion and general philosophy. I received my undergraduate degree from California State University at Sacramento and a doctorate in applied philosophy from Bowling Green State University. Selected as a 2005-2006 Carnegie Scholar, my ongoing SoTL research focuses on developing and assessing moral reasoning processes in undergraduate students. I currently am a member of my university’s CASTL Institutional Leader Program team investigating liberal education core curriculum student learning outcomes, including the development of moral reasoning skills. My philosophical research interests include the requirements for a just educational institution and the ethics of post-cadaveric compensation for organ transplants.