Increasing Ethical Awareness

Is there a formula for ethics teaching more effective than others, if the purpose is to make a difference as to how students relate and respond to ethical problems in their own lives? And, if so, what would that formula look like? Would it be anything similar to ethics teaching as it is “ generally” performed or would it be something entirely different? In this thesis, some results are presented that might give us a clue.

By performing a large impact study, Hans Teke has compared two different “methods” for teaching ethics as part of the religious education in the Swedish upper secondary school, with regard to their capacity to increase long-term ethical awareness. What he found was that the teaching method used in the intervention group, the Three Step Model, appears to make the students develop more compared to “regular” ethics teaching, not least with regard to demonstrable knowledge in ethical problemsolving. This indicates that the method has a promising potential that deserves to be further explored in different settings, of course with the goal of making it even more efficient.