An investigation of the part played by principle in the moral decisions of grade seven pupils.

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dc.contributor.authorSt. Clair, Alan McEwanen_US
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-15T18:24:51Z
dc.date.available2024-08-15T18:24:51Z
dc.date.copyright1970en_US
dc.date.issued1970
dc.degree.departmentFaculty of Education
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Curriculum and Instruction
dc.degree.levelMaster of Arts M.A.en
dc.description.abstractThe study was designed to measure the extent to which Grade Seven pupils, in their decision-making, employ principle as opposed to self-interest, and to determine whether or not significant differences in this measure would appear when the means of three different types of school (public, private secular, and private religious) were compared. Two parallel forms of a moral dilemma questionnaire were devised, each containing twenty items. Ss were required, on each item, to read a brief account of a dilemma situation, and then to make two choices--the first indicating which of two given mutually exclusive courses of action they would select in the circumstances outlined; and the second indicating which of four given reasons was closest to their own main reason for so selecting. For each pupil, then , two scores were obtained--a score on first choices ("apparently principled" choice of action), and a score on second choices ("principled motivations"). The instrument was administered to a sample consisting of 241 Grade Seven pupils from the Greater Victoria area. Verbal and non-verbal I.Q. ratings were obtained for the 80 public school Ss, and information on which SES ratings could be based was obtained from all Ss. Statistical treatment of the data included an analysis of variance with scores on the instrument as dependent variables and type of school and sex as independent variables; calculation of correlation coefficients between I.Q. and SES ratings on one hand, and the dependent variables on the other; and an analysis of co-variance with SES ratings as the covariate. The only differences which reached statistical significance at the .01 level were those between the means of girls and the means of boys, with girls' scores exceeding boys' scores on all measures of the dependent variables. It was found that mean scores of Type 1 (public) schools regularly exceeded those of Type 2 (private secular) schools, which, in turn, were consistently higher than those of Type 3 (private religious) schools. It was felt that the consistency of this trend, and the fact that it reached statistical significance at the .05 level on one variable, justified further research to determine whether or not causal relationships exist between these difference in means and differences in procedures within the schools themselves.en
dc.format.extent95 pages
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/19773
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.titleAn investigation of the part played by principle in the moral decisions of grade seven pupils.en_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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