Educational Psychology Third Edition Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary ...

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...Consistent with our past research, children
attributed the kinds of moral choices made by younger
children to adults. In our view, this finding tends to
support a constructivist rather than a [social modeling]
view of morality, which would predict that the child's
judgments mirror (or develop toward) their
representation of adult judgments. [p. 41]
Relevance: a framework for understanding moral development
In other words, thought Kelvin, if children learned
moral beliefs by imitating (or modeling themselves
after) parents or other adults, then they ought to see
themselves as resembling adults more and more as they
get older. Instead, they see themselves as resembling
adults less, at least during middle childhood. This
would happen only if they were preoccupied with
"constructing" their own beliefs on the basis of their
experiences, and therefore failed to notice that adults
might also have constructed beliefs similar to their own.
The article by Saltzstein offered a way to understand how children develop moral beliefs, and especially to
understand the change from moral heteronomy to moral autonomy. By imposing controls on the procedures
(uniform interviews) and on the selection of participants (particular ages, particular societies or cultures), the
researchers eliminated certain sources of ambiguity or variability in children's responses. By framing their project
in terms of previous theories of moral development (Piaget’s, Turiel’s), furthermore, they made it easier to interpret
their new results in the general terms of these theories as well. In these ways the investigation aspired to provide a
general perspective about children's moral development. Providing a framework for understanding, you recall, is
one of the major purposes of many professional publications.
But note that the authors paid a price for emphasizing this purpose. By organizing their work around existing
general theory and research, they had to assume that readers already had some knowledge of that theory and
research. This is not an unreasonable assumption if the readers are expected to be fellow researchers; after all,
many of them make a living by "knowing the literature" of psychology. But assuming such knowledge can be an
obstacle if the authors intend to communicate with non-psychologists: in that case, either the authors must make
more of an effort to explain the relevant background research, or readers must educate themselves about the
research. The latter activity is not necessarily difficult (the background knowledge for Saltzstein's work, for
example, took me only a few paragraphs to explain in writing), but it must be done to make full sense of research
that tries to provide a universal framework of psychological knowledge.
The reader's role: interested observer of children
In conducting and reporting their research, Saltzstein and his colleagues were not presenting themselves as
school teachers, nor were they expecting readers necessarily to respond as teachers. As they put it in the first
paragraph of the article, they sought to offer "a more contextualized perspective for understanding the development
of moral judgments" [p. 37]. Unlike most teachers, they seemed indifferent to recommending how children's moral
judgements ought to be fostered. Observation of children was their purpose, not intervention. The meaning of the
term "contextualized perspective" was not obvious to Kelvin when he first read it, but eventually it became clearer:
they were talking about the importance of distinguishing among types of moral decisions and moral beliefs. They
did sometimes note information relevant to teaching—for example, they pointed out that for cultural reasons,
teachers in Brazil do not command high respect and therefore compared to American children, Brazilian children
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