TEACHER PERCEPTIONS OF CHILDREN’S MORAL BEHAVIOR RICHARD L. KREBS

Sinai Hospital of Baltimore

In talking with teachers and reading the education literature (Terman & Tyler, 1946; Meyer & Thompson, 1956) one gets the impression that teachers perceive girls as more moral than boys. The following research was undertaken both to check on the existence of the impression that teachers do see girls as more moral than boys and also to assess the accuracy of the teachers’ perceptions.

METHOD Subjects

A random sample of sixth grade children was selected from ten classes in a middle class and a working class school to fit a balanced factorial design with two factors, sex and social class. The boys and girls groups were controlled for I&, The I& scores were obtained from the school records and were based on standardized group intelligence tests. While the design called for 132 subjects, only 127 subjects were obtained. (Five working class boys were lost during the study.)

Procedure To assess the impression that teachers do see girls as more moral than boys, the teachers were

asked to rate the subjects on three scales of morality previously used by Kohlberg (1958): Trust- worthiness, Obedience, and Respect for Others’ Rights.

To assess the accuracy of the teachers’ perceptions, two behavioral measures of morality were employed: Kohlberg’s Moral Judgment Inventory (1958) and three cheating tests. Kohlberg’s Moral Judgment Inventory uses a series of ten hypothetical moral dilemmas to identify a child’s level of moral judgment. A child may be premoral, conventioiial o r principled. At the premoral level the child’s moral judgments are based on sanctions, rewards and punishments. At the conventional level the child bases his moral judgments 011 the demands of adults and authorities. At the principled level the child’s judgment is based on internalized rules of justice aiid respect and on the dictates of the child’s own conscience.

The three cheating tests consisted of an individual test and two group tests. In the individual cheating test the subjects played a ray gun aiid a model house game/while the experimenter sat at a table some distance from the game working on some papers. In the ray gun game the subject shot a ray gun at a revolving target. In the model house game the subject was supposed to place furniture in a series of rooms to form a pleasing room arrangement. (A fuller description of the games appears in Krebs, 1967.) If the subject obtained a score of 25 or more points on the game he received a prize: a sharp shooter’s medal for the ray gun game, and an I. D. bracelet for the model house game. Each subject recorded his own scores. The games had been programmed so that it was necessary to cheat in order to win the prize.

The two group tests were adaptions of Hartshorne and May’s Improbable Achievement Tests (Hartshorne & May, !928-1930), previously used,by Grim,. Kohlberg and White (1968). The first of the two tests, The Carcle Test, consisted of a series of horizontal rows of small circles in which the subject was supposed to write the numbers one through ten with his eyes closed. The subject’s score was the number of times he placed the number a t least 50y0 inside the circle. While the subjects took the test the experimenter stood with his back to the class and looked at the clock on the wall to time the test. His behavior made it possible for the children to cheat by opening their eyes with little chance of being detected. On the second group test, the Blocks Test, the subject was given a sheet of paper with drawings of blocks piled on top of one another. The subject was supposed to decide how m n v blocks were touching a block with an “x” on it and write that number next to the “x.” His score was simply the number of numbers he recorded whether they were correct or not. Grim et al. (1968) found that accuracy of the response correlated very highly with total responses. At the end of the test a confidant called the experimenter ol!t of the room. for three minutes, again giving the children a chance to cheat. While it was not possible to determule exactly which subject cheated on the group tests and which did not, Grim et a1. (!968) found that a high score probably reflected cheat- ing. I n both the individual and group testmg situations the experimenter appeared indifferent to the child’s behavior and made no clear demands beypnd a brief explanation of the rules of the games.

The teacher ratings and the behavioral indicies were kept independent by not informing the teachers of the results of the child’s behavior and by not scoring the ratings until all of the testing waa completed.

RESULTS’ On the teacher ratings of morality, girls were rated as more moral than boys on

all three scales for both middle class and working class children. Girls are clearly ‘For supplementary tabular material, order NAPS Document 00219 from ASIS National Auxil-

iary Publications Service, c/o CCM Information Sciences, Inc., 22 West 34th Street, New York, N. Y. 10001; remitting $1.00 for microfiche or $3.00 for photocopies.

TEACHER PERCEPTIONS OF CHILDREN’S MORAL BEHAVIOR 395

seen as more moral than boys regardless of the moral dimension scaled and regardless of the social class of the child.

Turning to the behavioral indicies of morality, girls were not more moral than boys on Kohlberg’s Moral Judgment Inventory. In fact, in the middle class group, boys were more moral than girls.

There were 110 significant differences between middle class boys and girls on the three cheating tests. In the working class group, girls were more moral than boys on one of the three cheating tests.

The results show that teachers do view girls as more moral than boys, but the teachers’ viewpoint is not supported by behavioral evidence. The latter results are in general agreement with previous research on differential moral behavior in boys and girls. Most previous researchers have found no difference in cheating behavior in boys and girls (Mutterer, 1965; Nelson, Grinder, & Howard, 1967; Burton, Mac- coby, & Allinsmith, 1961; Johnson, 1943). Hartshorne and May (1928-30) did find a few cases in which boys were more honest than girls and girls gave more service to other people than boys did.

The present study cannot answer the question of why teachers misperceive the moral behavior of their students; however, several possible explanations have been offered :

Girls are more conforming than boys and teachers may have confused con- formity with morality.

Girls are more eager to please authorities than boys are and teachers may have confused this eagerness to please with morality.

Boys have a less positive self-image than girls do a t the late primary grade level and perhaps teachers have confused the children’s self-image with their actual moral behavior.

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HARTSHORNE, II., & MAY, M. Studies in the nature of character. New York: Macmillan, 1928-30. JOHNSON, L. Pupil cheating. Education Digest, 1943, 9, 32-34. KOHLUERG, L. The development of modes of moral thinking and choice in the years ten to sixteen.

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MEYER, W., & THOMPSON, G. The differences in the distribution of teacher approval and disapproval

MUTTERER, M. Factors affecting the specificity of preadolescents’ behavior in a variety of tempta-

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