13.2 Appendix c: the reflective practitioner  (Page 9/25)

For Kelvin, therefore, the outcomes of research on moral development—including Saltzstein's that he was currently reading—posed issues of classroom management, both in university classrooms and in public school classrooms. So Kelvin read on. Saltzstein proposed resolving the issues about the origins of moral development by distinguishing between moral conflicts and moral dilemmas:

Saltzstein and his colleagues proposed that when young children show awareness of moral rules, they may be doing so in the simpler context of moral conflicts. A young child might believe that you should return a dollar to its owner, even if the child has trouble in practice overcoming a selfish impulse to keep the dollar. The same child might have trouble deciding, however, whether it is "right" to inform his teacher if a best friend has cheated on a test. In that case two moral principles compete for attention—honesty and loyalty to a friend. To sort out the implications of choosing between these principles, a young child might need to rely on older, wiser minds, such as parents or other adults. The minute that he or she does so, the child is showing the moral heteronomy that Piaget used to write about and that Saltzstein referred to early in the article.

Understanding these ideas took effort, but once Kelvin began figuring them out, the rest of the article was easier to follow. In reading the remaining pages, he noted in passing that the researchers used several techniques common in educational research. For example, they interviewed participants, a common way of gathering systematic information about individuals' thinking. They also imposed controls on their procedures and on the selection of participants. Procedures were controlled, for example, by posing the same three moral dilemmas and to all participants, so that individuals' responses could be compared meaningfully. The selection of participants was controlled by selecting two age groups for deliberate comparison with each other—one that was seven years old and the other that was eleven. Since the researchers wanted to generalize about moral development as much as possible, but they obviously could not interview every child in the world, they sampled participants: they selected a manageable number (sixty-five, to be exact) from the larger student population of one particular school. In a second part of the investigation, they also selected a comparable number of children of the same two ages (7 and 11) from the city of Recife, located in Brazil. The Brazilian group's responses were compared deliberately with the American group's responses, in order to allow for the impact of cultural beliefs on moral development in general. Kelvin recognized this research strategy as an example of using control groups. In research terms, the Brazilian group "controlled for" the impact of American culture on children's moral beliefs, and vice versa, the American group controlled for the impact of Brazilian culture on children's moral beliefs. Altogether, these techniques helped insure that the interviews of children's moral beliefs really illustrated what they were supposed to illustrate—that they were reliable and valid, in the senses that we discussed in earlier chapters. As Kelvin noticed Saltzstein's attention to good research techniques, he gained confidence in Saltzstein’s observations and in the interpretations that the authors made from them.