Journal of Education and Psychology

A two phase study was conducted to develop a teaching-specific moral reasoning test, involving refinement of test scale indices. All data for both phases of the study were collected in Taiwan.

The Test of Teachers' Moral Reasoning (TTMR) was developed and used in the first phase study. Subjects were asked to rate the importance of each of 15 "consideration statements" related to moral dilemmas presented in story form and to rank the three most important statements form each story. Forty three teacher college students served as the novice group and 26 teaching faculty and ex-teachers were ominated to serve as the expert group. T-tests comparisons of the weighted scores for the rankings show that the experts scored higher than the novices on the TTMR.

Phase Two of the study employed the revised TTMR and the Chinese Defining Issues Test (DIT) as instruments. Samples included 223 primary school teachers and 108 teacher college students. The primary school teachers were divided into morally expert and less morally expert teachers, according to the morality nomination. The peer popularity nominations also separated the teachers into popular and less popular teacher categories.

Thirty two indexing methods for the TTMR had been tried in order to see which consistently yielded the best results. The findings showed that the TTMR was valid and reliable. Results also indicated that, compared with the Chinese DIT, the TTMR better differentiated the morally expert teachers from the less morally expert teachers.

Limitations and suggestions for future studies were also discussed.

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