Бесплатный фрагмент - Quantifying the Moral Dimension

Dedicated to the memory of John M. Hull

Editor’s Foreword

This compact work tells of an enterprise bold in both its subject and its design. Its focus on morality places this project in linear descendancy from the interest of the ancients in education for moral living and civic virtue. It also connects it back to the western Enlightenment’s quest for knowledge of moral truths, and to the subsequent internalisation of the subject with 20th century psychology’s exploration of the moral consciousness of the individual and the development of that consciousness from childhood. The subject of moral education has a rich background. Looking forward, it has also acquired a new urgency as the dizzying speed of technological, scientific developments and startling changes in our environmental, public health, demographic, economic and political contexts make for a complex present and uncertain future. We may not know what world we are preparing our young people for, but it is perhaps more important now than ever before to examine principles for reasoning and action that will hold good in the face of unforeseen challenges and hitherto unimaginable possibilities.

The interest of this work is practical. Its aim is to present something of application and benefit to existing educational contexts, and so it is not the place for philosophical first-principles theorisation. Rather it straight away aligns itself with constructivist pedagogies. Morality is treated as a process, as an operation. While acknowledging that it is inevitably a simplification, the author nevertheless adopts for its usefulness, the measurement of progress in a subject’s ability for moral judgment as an indicator of the development of moral consciousness. Where that moral consciousness and judgment is deemed to be of great significance to the individual’s negotiation through the world and the right ordering of that world, then the assessment of young people’s progress towards that consciousness, and of the effectiveness of educational systems in promoting that consciousness, becomes important. This brings us to the boldness of the method presented in this work.

The memorably named ONYX test (for the “Assessment of moral discernment and coherence of judgment”) described here constitutes this work’s real innovation and contribution to the field. There is boldness in its advocacy of quantitative methods for the measurement of the moral qualities of individuals. The author goes so far as to write of the “instinctive repulsion” some might feel, nevertheless, he argues convincingly for an elaboration and accurate usage of quantitative methods as a way of countering trends of depersonalisation and preventing the manipulation of data by those seeking to control all aspects of human activity. He demonstrates this elaboration and usage in the chapters that follow. We find the ONYX test is far from the blunt instrument that critics of quantitative methods fear. The dilemma scenarios of the test are so devised as to capture subtleties of human motivations and understandings, and new technologies have brought greater sophistication to quantitative methods so that it is now possible to process numbers of a magnitude, in a complexity of relationships and with a speed unimaginable before. The results of the tests, as set out in this work, supply valuable insights into the maturation of moral consciousness and the effect of different educational environments on this. They raise interesting questions for further exploration and reflection, such as that of individual “giftedness” in the moral dimension. There are also some suggestions of the influence of cultural factors on the moral judgments of these Russian young people potentially opening up a new area of intercultural comparison. Above all, they encourage the wider use of such an instrument in other educational institutions and regional and national settings.

It is to enable the wider dissemination and use of such an instrument that this English version has been produced. There can be no better tribute to the vision, insight and dedication of Fedor Kozyrev, designer, research and author of this project, than the replication of his model in many and diverse settings and the accumulation and cross comparison of valuable data on the crucial question of the moral ordering of our lives and world.

Julia Ipgrave

Introduction to English edition

This volume highlights one aspect of an extended experimental initiative in the field of school education that has been undertaken by a group of scholars in St. Petersburg over the last decade. The main purpose of the work was the development of new approaches to moral and religious education and their methodological equipment. The initiative was welcomed by the state after a new National Curriculum, or Federal State Standards of Education, (as it is called in Russian), came into operation in 2010—2011. Two major changes in school policy were especially significant in this respect. Firstly, the concept of Personal Moral and Spiritual Development and Formation was introduced in 2009 and later became part of Federal Standards. It gave the green light for producing a religious education syllabus and the inclusion of moral and religious topics in school curricula. Secondly, the idea of personal school attainments was reconsidered and formulated in terms of competences instead of knowledge and skills. Three types of attainments were identified: 1) special or subject attainments linked to certain disciplines, 2) meta-subject attainments consisting mostly of universal learning skills, and 3) personal attainments reflecting changes in cognitive, communicative, emotional and behavioural dimensions of students’ psyche. Evaluation of personal attainments became quite a new task for Russian educational system and obviously not an easy one. Scholars who dared approach these new challenges had a good chance for obtaining grants. I was among them.

In 2011 I became a supervisor of a state supported scientific project based at one of St. Petersburg’s comprehensive state schools which received the status of a laboratory. The main target of the project was the development and trialling of an experimental programme of Spiritual and Moral Education, based on the interpretative approach. In fact, six years after the start of the project we had two big educational programmes on RE, approved by several school principals, covering the whole period of secondary and high schooling (from 5th to 11th grades) and a good number of didactical resource s for different extracurricular activities. The ideas of J. Hull, M. Grimmitt, R. Jackson, T. Cooling and other outstanding British scholars were extensively presented in all of these programmes but this is a subject for another book. Here we focus on the diagnostics of personal attainments that was also among the priorities of the project. Although not the primary task, it nevertheless attracted and brought to our team specialists in psychological diagnostics from several academic institutions and methodological centres whose considerable contribution was critical for the successful completion of the project. Alla Doumcheva, the docent of the psychology department at St. Petersburg Academy of Post-Diploma Pedagogical Education played the main role in this cooperation and became my main partner for the whole period of research. I express my gratitude to her.

The main parts of this study were originally published in Russian in 2016 under a deliberately ambiguous title that can be translated into English either as «Dimension of Subjectivity» or as «Measurement of the Subjective». A preface by A. Doumcheva opened the book. The main difference of the current English version besides language, is its single focus on a test for diagnostics of moral judgment competence called ONYX, while the double focus of Russian version paid equal attention to another diagnostic tool called Q-sorting. The difference is determined by the much better acquaintance of the English speaking academic audience with Q-sort technique and the availability of English literature on this topic. In Russia this technique is still generally seen in a too narrow way as an attachment to the Carl Rogers’ Self Concept and is used in accordance with this vision. For this reason one of my tasks was to stimulate Q-sort usage in Russian educational research. Yet the English edition is not simply an extract from the original book. Some clarifications, additions and improvements were brought into the text, especially regarding some theoretical issues tackled in my previous publications in Russian.

Besides theoretical observations this book contains a bulk of empirical data collected during our surveys in St. Petersburg schools. How interesting and informative can they be for the Western reader? In order to answer this question I want to refer to the educational research project REDCo (2006—2009) funded by the European Commission and intended to evaluate the role of religion in education for the increase of both dialogue and conflict in the transforming societies of European countries. I was a member of the team coordinating the project’s activity in Russia. The sample for empirical studies used in that project was similar to the sample for further studies described in this book with several schools participating in both projects. What we found during REDCo was a large spectrum of commonalities in religious and moral beliefs of students from different countries. Students from St. Petersburg occupied a middle position in many issues related to religion. In some aspects they could be estimated as less religious (for instance in their attitude toward religious education), in other aspects (such as contemplating religious matters) more religious than an average European. One point only made our students distinct from their Western peers. In reaction to the statement «Religion belongs to private life» only 2% of our respondents disagreed with it, and it was an astonishing figure compared to almost a half disagreeing with it in many European countries and two thirds disagreeing with it in England. Paralleled with some other findings this result was interpreted then as a sign of a special hidden or asocial type of religiosity distinctive of Russian students and probably rooted in collective historical consciousness (Kozyrev & Valk 2009, 326, 335, 340, 346). While keeping in mind this particular point, one may take the REDCo experience as a ground for caution in the extrapolation of data presented in this volume to the European context.

The theses of this book were presented and discussed at many conferences inside Russia and on a few occasions abroad. One of them was ISREV-2014 in York. Another was a couple of meetings (2013, 2015) in Klingenthal (France) organised in the frame of post-REDCo activities for participants of REDCo project. I express my gratitude for this opportunity to REDCo and post-REDCo coordinator Prof. Wolfram Weisse.

I know exactly where my interest for educational studies came from. It was in 2000 in Kappel (Switzerland) that I first met John Hull at a seminar organised by the RE-network (coordinated by Walter Sennhauser). It was from him that I first heard about J. Fowler’s stages of faith as well as about Kohlberg. Professor Hull did much more to excite my interest in the field and years later, having become a professor myself, I used to start my lectures on pedagogy with a story about how one English lecturer persuaded me in an hour or two that pedagogical science exists, although I had doubted it for many years before despite the dozens of lectures on pedagogy I had to attend during my post-graduate education.

The last time I met John Hull in Birmingham, was in his house and several months before he passed away. I told him about our research work and about my plans for revising Kohlberg’s model. He listened carefully and encouraged me to continue the work. Between these two meetings there were many others, and I had a privilege to have John as my guest in St. Petersburg where he came as a missioner of new movements in RE. I dedicate my book to the memory of this great man. Let it be a small reimbursement for the courage, energy, and generosity with which he shared the best achievements of British and, indeed, world pedagogical science with me.

1. Constructivism in the practice of pedagogical research

We start with considerations of constructivism because constructivist thinking is the very bedrock of the attempt to trace patterns of moral judgment presented in this book. Our understanding of this relationship did not come to us in the course of experimental work. It had been there from the beginning shaping the whole project. Constructivism (as we understand it) was our theoretical framework. So, let’s start from the beginning.

The end of the last and the beginning of the current millennium were marked by the growing influence of constructivism in pedagogical practice. The image of a tabula rasa of consciousness (Locke) impressed with unequivocal stamps by means of a “didactic machine” (Comenius) has ultimately been substituted with the image of a self-developing system, the main determinant of which lies not outside but inside. Constructivism in its radical forms proposed an end to the search for any linear connections between external stimuli and the psychic reactions of the organism and a switch to the study of the internal regulators responsible for a kind of “filtration” of the experience, i.e. its selection, amplification or reduction through perception and further interpretation. Constructivism made a decisive step to break with behaviourist tradition when it shifted the focus of study from the subject’s reactions to the subject’s internal world. As for comparison with experimental psychology, constructivism gave it a push toward a holistic orientation in line with gestalt-psychology but sublimating its notion of the existence of implicit integral perceptional structures and associating them not with the subconscious but with cognitive characteristics of the consciousness.

The vital impulse for this shift came from Kant and his doctrine of the transcendental structures of consciousness. These structures were named differently after Kant: either noetic elements (Husserl) or the tacit dimension (Polanyi) or cognitive schemas (Piaget) or personal constructs (Kelly). Whatever the terminology, the names referred to implicit structures acting beyond the horizon of the conscious but accessible for scientific and particularly experimental exploration and description. Using a naturalistic analogy, according to the premises of constructivism these structures are responsible for the formation of our conceptions, commitments and outlook just as our digestive organs are responsible for the construction of molecules that constitute our body.

So, we take as a foothold for all the philosophical and pedagogical endeavours of constructivism the Kantian notion of the reconstruction of the outer world by the mind, that is, the belief that knowledge is not obtained in a passive fashion but is actively construed by the cognitive subject. Yet this constructivist offspring of Kantianism offered something new. It was the intention to perceive knowledge as an artificial construction quite contrary to the initial Kantian vision of the spontaneous action of factors inherited by human nature. This turn toward socio-cultural factors emphasised the potential role of education and socialisation in personal formation. And it is not a coincidence that the idea of socio-genesis, first formulated by the Piaget’s disciple Pierre Janet, found such fruitful ground in the constructivist field. It is enough to mention the culture-historical theory of Lev Vygotsky.

The conviction that constructs may be purposefully affected by means of education seems to contradict the initial constructivist thesis about the priority of the internal over the external. However, this reverse takes place at another level of tackling the problem. The transition from behaviourist to constructivist paradigm entails the enrichment of pedagogy with important theoretical notions and methodological principles. Perhaps the most important among these is the notion of the active and selective participation of the subject in the assimilation of the matters delivered to that subject and the consequent principle of resistibility. According to this, any external impact on an organised system causes its stronger or weaker resistance. The more complex and coherent the system, the more difficult it is to intrude into it without damaging its existing structures. In the extreme, any attempt to inculcate an idea or a value into someone’s mind will produce a painful reaction or rejection similar to what often happens with tissue transplantation. This principle was grasped and fixed in the concept of intraception by one of the first constructivists, William Stern. The internalisation of external matters, according to Stern, is feasible only after the transformation of other’s intentions into own intentions of the developing person and after he or she grants place to these formerly alien aims and matters in the universe of his/her previously internalised contents and aims.

But what happens if a new experience or new knowledge does not fit the existing conceptual frame or set of representations? For instance, a child who used to perceive his parents as omnipotent beings suddenly finds that they are as dependent on some other’s will as he is on them. Obviously, he has to give up his existing idea of a hierarchical system of relations and change it for a more complex one, incorporating another, higher level of power. Thus, Piaget’s doctrine of the developmental process as a set of progressive leaps in the direction of the extension of cognitive schemas became the cornerstone of the most fruitful constructivist movements. Structural theories of personal development built on this base put forward one more principle common for constructivism, namely the quantum character of self-development. In fact, this principle is a derivative of a basic constructivist premise about the existence of active internal structures responsible for the organisation of experience. Any sort of discontinuity of a transition presupposes non-uniformity of an object or a milieu in which it takes place, that is, it presupposes structure. This is because the very steadiness of structures is due to their ability to resist external influences up to a certain critical point and to change abruptly beyond this point. When Max Planck discovered the quantum effect, it became clear that atoms have structure. Observations made by Piaget and his followers convinced them that something similar takes place in the realm of the psyche. Personal constructs do not change through our life gradually and smoothly. They have a tendency to stay unchanged (resistibility), so each occurrence of a new construct is preceded by a break-up of an old one. The inner world of a human being resembles a kaleidoscope, in which one complex and coherent pattern replaces another without intermediate stages. The mission of education is to prevent recycling and to evolve the process into a progressing line coordinated by a pedagogical ideal. This is what Piaget recognised as the main perspective of personal development and defined in terms of progressive changes of schemas.

Another heuristic point in Piaget’s doctrine was a statement about the inseparability of two processes, one of which was the assimilation of external matter by the mind and another was the transformation of the mind by this matter. «The mind organizes the world by organizing itself». This famous aphorism of Piaget let radical proponents of constructivism consider cognition and education as modes of activity whose primary aim is rather the arrangement of a human’s inner world than comprehending the world around. The interaction of constructs with the outer world results not only in the adjustment of the latter to the demands of the former. Constructs themselves are adjusted to reality. Piaget conceptualised these two sides of the same process in physiological terms of assimilation and accommodation, the latter being responsible for the change of constructs and allowing in particular the consideration of the cognitive development of a human being as a form of evolutionary variability and as a sort of biological (and social) adaptation to the environment via self-organisation. In this biological discourse constructivism grants affinity with synergetics and borrows its conceptual framework and its theoretical potency.

It is worth restating that constructs dwell mainly beyond the conscious. They are not merely complexes of notions, as it was in the example with parents given above. They consist of psychological states and acts preceding rational activity. Included in this category may be acts of intentionality, apperception, intuition, motivation, semantic conjugation, that is, involvement in a certain language game (Wittgenstein) and in a hermeneutic circle of a culture, subjection to the pressure of metanarratives (Lyotard) and social prejudices (Gadamer) etc. From this point of view any investigation of the conscious on the constructivist premises is always a deep inquiry — an attempt to get a glimpse into the dimension of the psychological life of a person that is hidden from his/her own eyes. Many schools of psychology attempt it, but in different ways. The peculiar features of the constructivist approach are better seen in its contraposition with Freudianism.

Many celebrated scholars, disciples of Freud himself included, criticised psychoanalysis for its dangerous insularity, not allowing researchers to get beyond legitimate interpretations. H. Olport, for instance, claimed that the desire to seek hidden motives and complexes in all psychological phenomena results in a sort of methodological presbyopia in which a psychoanalyst cannot see and take into account obvious and open motivations. Monolithic and strictly focused in its method, this school comes close to the point where the hermeneutic circle turns into a vicious one. The researcher armed with an omnipotent theory is quite unlikely to be interested in facts that do not fit that theory. Much more interesting for him are facts that support the theory, so the theory starts serving itself, a process that was brilliantly described by T. Kuhn regarding science in general. We deal here with the basic problem of scientific investigation, namely that of theoretically encumbered fact, the one that neo-positivists and phenomenologists struggled with a hundred years ago. Freudianism is a bright but far from unique example of the dialectics of advantages and disadvantages of the empiric-analytical method. The firmer the theory, the more logically coherent it is, the more sophisticated and exact its methodical equipment, the narrower is the set of phenomena that can be lassoed by it without distorting truth. As a consequence of its brave (and in many ways successful) reduction of the human psyche to basic human instincts Freudianism distorted beyond recognition the image of the healthy psyche and finally lost the taste for its study and concentrated on abnormalities. The return of the complete and healthy personality into psychology as a result of overcoming a reductionist temptation was the achievement of scientists belonging to humanist and phenomenological schools — A. Maslow, C. Rogers and others.

The mention of Carl Rogers is especially appropriate here because his Self Concept with its methods of study is a paradigmatic example of the constructivist approach to personality. His Self Concept is in fact a mega-construct by means of which people evaluate themselves. The differences from Freudianism in this approach are not only the much lower level of reduction (Self Concept consists of seventy or more respondents’ judgments regarding most aspects of his/her private and social life) but also the more cautious and modest position of a psychologist in making diagnoses. The new wave of psychology explicated by Rogers advances together with a phenomenological culture of research, prescribing avoidance of hasty evaluations and awareness of prejudices absorbed unnoticed alongside methodological standards.

Rudimentary to this movement was W. Dilthey’s project of descriptive or structural psychology. The opposition of explanative and descriptive psychology correlates with the distinction he proposesbetween natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Freudianism and constructivism occur in this scheme on different sides, as long as the former hastens to give explanations for tacit dimensions of psychological life while the latter seeks to uncover these dimensions for observation and reflection. J.-P. Ricoeur called psychoanalysis an archaeology of the soul meaning not only its concern with the past as the cause of the present condition of the patient but also its habit to reproduce the whole from its fragments. Anamnesis comes in this case as a result of the particular combination of pieces fished out of the stream of information by means of an instrument tuned in advance to catch highly specific psychological structures. Other things are filtered out. Constructivism, on the contrary, motivates the researcher to collect and to include in analysis as many descriptions as possible in the mode of C. Gyrtz’s doctrine or that of literary criticism and to elaborate (or adjust) criteria for diagnostics afterwards on the basis of the collected data. The reproduction of a hidden pattern is achieved in this mode not through the application of a universal scheme to the particular case and the excogitation of missing pieces but through resorting and reshuffling numerous data until reaching the maximal likelihood.

So the aspiration to minimize the damage of reduction (that is the deliberate impoverishment and simplification of the rich whole, associating it with an abstract model, projecting onto it a chosen plan, neglecting details etc.) determines the main difference between constructivism and former empiric-analytical methods of studying hidden psychological processes. This feature brings constructivism close to the humanities. At the same time a characteristic for the former is the wider application of analytical procedures, quantitative methods and statistics than is usual for the latter. It even has sights on not just the disclosure but also the quantification or measurement of the dark side of psychic reality.

In this respect constructivism implies the principle of complementarity (N. Bohr). On the one hand the aspiration to observe intact the structure of its object means abstaining from its complete disassembly and employing instead the technique of drawing or sketching a portrait. At this holistic level of description constructivism operates as a rule with integral moulds or patterns of individual and collective psychic complexes. On the other hand, a construct is by definition something consisting of elements. Accordingly, it is hardly possible for constructivism to reject the use of analytical procedures, of modelling and programming constructs. As a result of the implementation of this atomistic approach the mould of psychic complexes emerges as a “digital” image produced according to certain formulated rules from identifiable elements. This mosaic-style reconstruction of the psyche as a method corresponds perfectly to the mosaic nature of its referent — to the nature of a construct.

As a platform for the synthesis of humanities and empiric-analytical approaches constructivism incorporates a wide range of ideas and methods from structuralism (in a generally-scientific, not in a specifically psychological meaning) and hermeneutics. Structuralism is a pole of attraction for the harder branch of constructivism aiming at the maximal formalisation of description and preferring the abstraction, mathematical language and methods of exact sciences. Representatives of this branch are inclined to consider constructs as schemes, apt for mathematical representation. Not coincidentally Piaget used the term of cognitive schema for the basic concept of his structural theory of development. Constructivism of this sort has a strong nomothetic tendency toward the discovery of universal laws. The border between structuralism and constructivism at this pole is blurred yet the probable criterion for distinguishing between them may be the more dynamic vision of constructs assumed by constructivism.

The softer branch of constructivism tends toward the pole of the humanities. It borrows from the humanities-style idiographic set of ideas its focus on the concrete and unique, the idea of the hermeneutic circle, its contextual approach to the interpretation of data, its concern about the problem of the compliance of the researcher’s and respondent’s “horizons of interpretation” and their belonging to one and the same “language game”. The construct in this version is regarded as a personal narrative rather than a scheme, and group patterns play the roles of “meta-narratives” (Lyotard), shared within (sub) cultures and responsible for the formation of “narrative identities” (Ricoeur). As the language of mathematics is not suitable here it is substituted with the language of narration, hence models are replaced by plots and the roles of formula are often played by metaphors. Yet general constructivist commitment to analysis stays alive and takes in the idiographic frame of reference, a form of preference for ipsative scales. The diversity and the uniqueness of personal narratives obstruct significantly the perspective of finding general regularities and orient the researcher toward the ideal of better understanding as promoted by the Dilthey’s project of structural psychology. At the same time a matured hermeneutical tradition with its notion of prejudices directs the researcher toward recognition of socio-cultural conditionality of psychic phenomena and makes constructivism more successful than structuralism in this respect.

For constructivism its position on the border between humanities and positive sciences is a stimulus for innovative activity in its methodology. Here it can build on the ideas of cybernetics and synergetics, of information theory and the theory of systems, of semantics and semiotics, of theoretical and applied linguistics, of non-parametrical statistics and of other new fields of study generated in the space of interdisciplinary integration. Of special interest here are the methods that allow the detection, identification and quantification of hidden factors and parameters as soon as they are the primary focus of constructivism itself. Activity and integrity are the first among the parameters that are a-priori ascribed to constructs. One of the first attempts in the pre-paradigm history of constructivism to try the constructivist idea of measuring psychic properties belongs to J.-F. Herbart. He has chosen the intensity of perceptions as the parameter for detection. He relied on activity, the first of the two basic characteristics of constructs Modern constructivism does not abandon this perspective. The rigidity/permeability of constructs (Kelly) that can be measured in the series of subsequent tests is but one example of such a dynamic characteristic. However, the mainstream of constructivism today has taken another direction connected to the measurement of another parameter — that of integrity. This turn was dictated by the revolution in computer facilities that provided an ordinary researcher with unprecedented and almost unbelievable opportunities for the statistical processing of data. These enabled the realisation of the above-mentioned strategy of data reshuffling and the reconstruction of the psyche in the form of “digital moulds”. Figuratively speaking, if a researcher of former times was given a million pieces to make one big image he would probably doubt whether his life would be long enough for completing this puzzle. Today the researcher has an opportunity to hand over this task to a machine that will resolve the task in a couple of minutes. Some of these new technologies, such as factor analysis, were imported by constructivism from other scientific schools. Some came out of its own workshops. Tests on moral capacities (the main topic of this book) belong mostly to the second category.

Constructivism bases its strategy on a humanities-style determination to overcome the toxic consequences of reductionism. But unlike other humanities movements it tries to achieve this aim not at the expense of achievements in computer techniques, mathematical statistics and analysis but through their more intensive usage. The binding pedantry of old science is overpowered by means of reconsidering the role and the potency of the methodological equipment of exact sciences. No more is it an idol on the pedestal of the infallibility of positive knowledge but an instrument in the palette of means for the researcher to use creatively..

Constructivist devotion to quantitative methods should be regarded neither as a result of compromise between the humanities and natural sciences nor as a return to ideals of positivism inspired by (really existing) dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of methodology of the humanities. Rather it should be regarded as a response to the challenges of the information era. The mass of information, the ongoing specialisation of scientific knowledge, the growing complexity of methods create a new form of esotericism, based on the impossibility for a mere mortal to understand the way of obtaining published data, or even more so to evaluate the reliability and consistency of their conclusions. The choice is either to capitulate to the power of scientific corporations and their sponsors or to improve abilities to resist manipulation through the methodological training of consumers of knowledge and developing institutions of independent expertise.

Constructivism occupies an active position in this respect. It is ready to struggle for scientific uprightness with mathematically formulated facts to hand, armed with the achievements of post-positivist epistemology and emancipated from the illusion of scientific impartiality, tempered with the skepticism of Popper’s fallibility and relativity. But in order to win in this way its methodological level of expertise must exceed that of scientific «scribes and Pharisees» who still insist that the researcher is for the method just as man is for the Sabbath and not vice versa. Contemporary scientific creativeness should confront the methodological narrowness of the former school not with voluntarism but with methodological sophistication that includes skills in different techniques and more adequate understanding of the role of personality in producing scientific knowledge. It seems as though constructivism more than any other scientific movement is able to show that the historically determined rise of the influence of the humanities in scientific knowledge does not necessarily mean the refusal of the positivists’ tool, but rather a more qualified usage of it. This may be the historical mission of constructivism.

So, the constructivist programmes of psychological and pedagogical diagnostics include the following principles:

— targeting the detection of hidden psychic structures (constructs) responsible for the interpretation of reality;

— acknowledgment of the dynamic nature and socio-cultural conditionality of constructs, emphasis on the social factors of their formation, including the narrative identity of the subject;

— interactive and flexible research strategies, improvising with the available set of methods and step by step correction of programmes in accordance with research results;

— contextual interpretation of phenomena under study, aspiration for semantic homogeneity of contents and means of expression;

— holistic devotion to the priority of the whole over the sum of parts, intention to represent the psyche in forms of integral patterns;

— “digital”, or combinative way of building and presenting patterns from discrete units which allows an analytical dismantling;

— wide application of psychometric technologies for quantifying selected parameters in universal and ipsative scales;

— using existent and developing new methods of multidimensional statistics and analysis for more effective operation with clusters and data sets;

— focus on the phenomena of coherency, coordination, hierarchical subordination and functional specialisation of psychic structures as a source of self-organisation and development of personality.

2. ONYX: A new moral judgment test

2.1. Historical background

ONYX is a transliteration of a Russian acronym. The full name of the test reads like “Assessment of moral discernment and coherence of judgment”. The meaning would be more properly represented if the word “moral” were relocated and placed before the word “judgment”, but this would make the abbreviation unpronounceable in Russian. What is more, the name of the stone would be lost in this case, and it would be a pity because onyx is a good symbol for the test. Like any stone our test is a solid cohesive thing but besides that it has a striped structure, just like onyx.

The idea of quantifying and measuring the moral qualities of a person cannot but cause an instinctive repulsion. Yet science has a history of breaking its way through the cordons of intuitive prejudices and instinctive protests. Anatomy is a good example showing how the once blasphemous practice of studying the human body gave new opportunities for healing. Is it impossible that results of the “anatomy of the soul” will bring forth good fruits in the future for pedagogical practice? Of course, the latter case is much more complicated not least because it is much more difficult to come to agreement about what is to be measured. A unifying theory is necessary in this case not only at the stage of the interpretation of data but at the very beginning while designing the approach. Differences of concepts about light or gravity were not obstacles to using scales or differentiating stars according to their luminosity because the ability to distinguish heavy from light and dark from bright lies in the commonality of sensual perception. Moral properties are not generally valid in the same sense.

Attempts to build a general theory of morality and establish common criteria of what it is to be moral have a long history. Of special interest in this respect is Socrates’ reasoning presented in Plato’s dialogue «Hippias Minor». In this dialogue Socrates asks his collocutor to think what is more immoral — to behave badly when you know what is right and what is wrong or to do it when you don’t know. Hippias, as the majority of us would, answers immediately:

— And how, Socrates, can those who intentionally err, and voluntarily and designedly commit iniquities, be better than those who err and do wrong involuntarily?

But this answer does not satisfy Socrates:

— And now I cannot agree in what you are saying, but I strongly disagree <….> and my opinion, Hippias, is the very contrary of what you are saying. For I maintain that those who hurt or injure mankind, and speak falsely and deceive, and err voluntarily, are better far than those who do wrong involuntarily.

Argumentation for this shocking conclusion is built on a sequence of analogies. Who is the better musician: the one who produces cacophony voluntarily or the one who can’t play properly? Who is the better athlete: the one who pretends that he has a pain in his knee and doesn’t want to run fast or the one who can’t run fast? Socrates does not find a reason why we should make an exception for moral actions in this sequence. And Hippias does not find contra-arguments except for a mere appeal to moral feeling:

— O, Socrates, it would be a monstrous thing to say that those who do wrong voluntarily are better than those who do wrong involuntarily!

— Socr.: And yet that appears to be the only inference.

Probably it could be regarded as a mere sophistic exercise, more so as Socrates confesses finally that he does not agree with himself in his conclusion. But in the history of pedagogy the nontrivial line of reasoning presented by Socrates in this dialogue appears from time to time among the thoughts of the most venerable scholars. Herbart in his «Textbook in Psychology» (Lehrbuch der Psychologie) claims that ethics attains its strength not in appeals for good behaviour addressed to human will but in the clarity and cohesion of moral vision or insight which constitutes a special competence. He called this competence moral judgment (or moral sense) and insisted time and again that this competence is not innate but is to be developed and trained by means of education. Being a variant of aesthetic judgment, this competence is more related to ideas of beautiful and ugly than to that of due and improper, and accordingly, the best means for its development are to be found not in logic and law but in the field of humanities. In his earlier work «The Science of Education and the Aesthetic Revelation of the World» he particularly focuses on this connection between ethics and aesthetics and on the role of humanities in moral education. The quality of moral judgment in complex situations depends on how rich, balanced, and comprehensive personal perceptions are. And humanities widening the horizon of a learner are able to prevent at the same time the one-sidedness of this judgment. Furthermore in Herbart’s system «the one-sided person approximates the egoist, even when he will not notice it himself, because he relates everything to the small circle of his own life and thought» (Meijer 2006). We have here a clear antecedent of Piaget’s theory that relates the moral development of a person to a process of successive decentration of ego and also a historical bridge from Socrates’ doubts about the morality of the morally ignorant to those modern scholars who base their evaluations of morality on concepts of moral competences.

According to Piaget, changes in mental abilities accompanying maturation are a key for all aspects of personal development. Processes of moral (and spiritual) development are paralleled in this approach with processes taking place in the cognitive domain. To become more moral means first of all to acquire more elaborated cognitive tools and to operate logical schemas of growing complexity that ensure more comprehensive awareness of the existence of another ego. While the substantial aspect of moral development is described as assimilation or interiorisation of external matter, its formal aspect appears as accommodation, that is, the transformation of cognitive structures (schemas in Piaget’s terms) under the influence of external matters for their better assimilation. Accommodation is generally directed toward decentration of ego, that is, toward successive unlocking of egocentric schemas.

Thus Piaget and later his disciple Lawrence Kohlberg reduce the development of moral consciousness to the progress in a subject’s ability for moral judgment. Certainly, it is a serious simplification, but it opens a door for using quantitative methods in diagnostics. Theoretically established a developmental vector constitutes a reference axis for the coordinated measurement and comparability of its results. However conventional it is, this coordination is better than nothing. In the situation of diverse axiological systems and pedagogical ideals it provides an opportunity to convert a highly nonproductive controversy about the priority or appropriateness of different systems of values into a more productive discussion about levels of consistency of empirically detected values with the conventional scale.

Using a mathematical analogy, evaluation of moral achievements on the personal way to excellence may be compared to the measurement of lengths of multidirectional vectors. As an ideal, to achieve a formal evaluation strictly abstracted from substantial aspects we need to supply each vector with units dividing it into a certain number of equal segments. In the situation of the multitude of directions we anticipate that the comparison of results will be a highly impracticable task. However, the powerful tools of statistics available today grant researchers courage that overcomes fears. Moreover, a number of procedures that proved their effectiveness, such as a factor analysis, function exactly via the projecting of multidirectional vectors to different axes. We can start at least with marking one chosen direction. And it is what Kohlberg did in 1964 when he offered a first quantified scale for comparison of moral abilities. The worth of the scale was to a large extent determined by a good choice of the vector direction, the joint merit of Kohlberg and Piaget.

L. Kohlberg’s structural model of moral development will be discussed later, in chapter 4. For the moment it is worth noticing that despite its heuristic significance it seems as though it is not the model itself that constitutes the main historical achievement of Kohlberg but rather the attached method that has proved the validity of his theory. This method widely known as moral dilemma method was the first to base evaluation of the level of moral consciousness not on self-assessments or declarations showing the awareness of the respondent about social demands but on the ability to understand moral situations. The idea was to reveal the motivation standing behind the moral decision of a respondent in a certain situation. It was expected to reflect the development of moral consciousness not at the level of theoretical knowledge about ethical norms and rules but at the level of their implementation. Moreover, the identification of higher stages of moral development with the ability for “post-conventional” moral judgment meant the demand for the respondent to exhibit some signs of autonomy in order to show good results in the test.

Kohlberg’s methodological approach met extensive criticism. Besides the axiomatic objection against the reduction of morality to cognitive aspects, the main points of his critics may be presented as follows:

— The scheme of successive moral development embedded into the method groundlessly claims to be universal. It does not take into account the socio-cultural determinacy of morality.

— The method is time consuming and non-effective. As interpretation of interviews is a complicated procedure not apt for unification, the risk of impartiality and subjectivism of diagnoses is too high.

— Successful execution of the test depends a great deal on the linguistic and communicative abilities of a child. In fact, the method misses its target.

Despite its reasonableness the criticism did not discredit the dilemma method, but on the contrary stimulated attempts at its improvement and became a powerful factor that helped to spread quantitative approaches in the field of personal moral development studies. The conversion of the interview into the form of a written standardised test may be regarded as the most important result of the international movement for the rehabilitation of Kohlberg that started already in his lifetime. Among the most successful implementations of his idea one should point out the Moral Judgment Test (MJT), designed in 1975 by Georg Lind, a German researcher from the University of Constance, and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) designed in 1974 by a group of scholars from Minnesota University (USA) under the leadership of a Kohlberg’s disciple James Rest. Both tests are recommended by their authors as instruments for measuring the level of development of moral consciousness and for assessment of efficiency of educational institutions and programmes in moral education. Tests proved their validity on samples that included in total more than 800 000 respondents all over the world. Their results are published in dozens of papers. ONYX is a product of a deep modification of these two foreign analogues.

2.2. Scientific rationale: what do we measure?

Tests based on the dilemma method have a crucial advantage over the other tools that are commonly used in educational systems to study personal and collective constructs of motivations and values, such as the Rokeach Value Survey test, Schwartz Value Survey test, Smekal Semantic Choice test, R. Cattell tests and many others. Dilemma tests provide an opportunity for direct quantitative assessment of the respondent’s ability to carry out educational tasks while the other tests mentioned are based on self-evaluation. Hence ONYX and its analogues are functionally very close to those common educational tests that are designed to measure levels of students’ competences in different areas. This advantage opens essentially new opportunities for pedagogical diagnostics of personal moral development, since:

1) it crucially limits up to potential exclusion a possibility for a respondent to simulate a good result, and

2) it helps to apply to the field of moral education the general idea of reorienting the school system of progress assessment from evaluation of knowledge to evaluation of skills. In this particular case it reorients to the assessment not of knowledge about values but of readiness to apply this knowledge to a problem situation.

As to the qualitative approaches to school assessment of the moral progress of students, such as pedagogical observation, interviews, etc., the obvious advantage of dilemma tests is their objectivity and efficiency. A standardised procedure and unified scale eliminate the factor of subjectivity and indistinct interpretation and ensure a higher reliability of results. Results may be assessed with statistical criteria of validity. Taking into account dozens of minutes spent for one interview, followed by a complicated procedure of interpretation with participation of skilled experts, the possibilities to use the classical version of Kohlberg’s method in school practice look highly limited. The usage of standardised written tests means a technological breakthrough. ONYX for instance allows completing simultaneously dozens of tests in big groups of students within 30—50 minutes and the interpretation of results may take even less time if relevant software is available.

The overlap of diagnostic and didactical functions is another essential advantage of dilemma tests when used in an educational system. In fact ONYX offers students one of the exercises that are defined in the new Russian Educational Standards (National Curriculum) as exercises targeting the formation of skills for solving problems and acting in the situation of uncertainty as well as exercises targeting the formation of semantic and axiological frames of reference and associated abilities to express moral judgments and/or personal points of view and to support them with related argumentation.

Results of the test inform us whether the respondent possesses a system of moral principles that are clear for him/her and coherent enough to apply to a real life situation. Kohlberg originally designed his method so that knowledge about social norms would not be enough to get through the test successfully. The test required reflective comprehension of these norms, personal commitment to them and deliberate preference for high motives of moral action. All three standardised versions of the dilemma method including ONYX amplify this initial focus on the competence aspect of moral development.

ONYX, like its analogues, is focused on the psychic activity that is known from scientific literature as moral judgment. Neo-Kohlbergian structural theory (Rest et al.) defines four key psychological components of moral action that are necessary for moral behaviour to take place. They are moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral character. ONYX is primarily focused on the second of these. At the same time, it is obvious that moral sensitivity is the first prerequisite for success in the test, since it is what lets the respondent see and identify the problem. The resultant index used in ONYX presupposes also actualisation of the third, motivational component of moral action. So “the most rational” component of the scheme is encumbered in the test with intuition and affection accompanying moral choice. It means that the test may not be identified as a kind of purely intellectual exercise but should be regarded as a kind of tool for specific diagnostics.

Although results of the test do not tell us directly what motivates the respondent in real life, it may tell us which kind of motivation is more attractive for the person, which one is more desirable to acquire or understood as something to be acquired. In relation to pedagogical goals it means that prioritised motivation is already included in the proximal zone of development, to use the Vygotskian term. So the main purpose of ONYX in the educational system may be defined accordingly as detection of the proximal zone of moral development for an individual or a group. The following particular functions of the test may be specified as most important within this general purpose:

— evaluation of moral input and efficiency of pedagogical treatment and educational programmes;

— monitoring dynamics of moral development;

— diagnostics of individual and group deviations in moral development.

According to the Piaget-Kohlberg structural theory of moral development, it is of great importance for a pedagogue to choose treatment relevant to the level of moral consciousness of a pupil. This treatment should initiate the pupil into a system of values and moral ideas inherent to the stage of moral development next to the one currently settled. Ability to detect the stage is critical for the implementation of this principle. Deployment of ONYX in educational practice is expected to be useful in this regard to put the task of facilitating the moral development of a pupil on a more solid scientific basis.

2.3. Description and distinctions

ONYX exists in two versions: a short and an extended one. The extended version consists of two separate tests. The first test (part A) is the original version of ONYX based on modification of MJT. The second part of the extended version (part B) is a product of modifying DIT in accordance with scores and grades used in the part A. Both parts employ the same set of four dilemmas which are operated in pairs.

Situations presented in the dilemmas explicate different aspects of moral problematics. Each dilemma may be corresponded with a reserve to a certain kind of moral problem:

in pair 1

— conflict of aims and means (dilemma «Workers»),

— choice in the situation of two bad options (dilemma «Promise»),

in pair 2

— violation of rules for a benefit (dilemma «Neighbours»),

— conflict of micro- and macro-social norms (dilemma «Denunciation»).

Each dilemma in test A is supplied with 6 arguments pro and 6 arguments contra actions/decisions of a character participating in the fictional situation. Arguments correspond to the 6 Kohlbergian stages of moral development. The task for the testee is to rank arguments in order of their moral acceptability or, in other words, according to the degree of consent with the arguments. In the test B the same dilemmas are supplied with a list of 10 questions to be ranked. The task for the testee in this case is to decide which question he regards more and which less important for judgment about the moral behaviour of the character. Questions correspond to a 5-stage model (with stages 5 and 6 combined) and are taken in pairs.

Questionnaires combined with the answer sheets occupy two two-sided sheets of paper for part A (one dilemma for one side of a sheet) and one for part B. The text of a dilemma is followed by numbered arguments / questions for ranking and a very simple table for answers to put numbers in (see table 1). In test A each dilemma is supplied with two tables, first pro and then contra. Dilemma «Neighbours» with related arguments and questions is presented in Appendix 1 to exemplify ONYX material.

Table 1

Testing is usually carried out in a group of respondents and takes 25—45 minutes for each part. There is also an electronic version of the tests operating online.

ONYX is essentially distinct from its analogues in its content, procedure, mathematical apparatus for data processing and the set of indices used.

Three out of four dilemmas used in the tests, as well as the arguments and questions for them, are designed by the author on the basis of a general Kohlberg approach. The fourth dilemma used in MJT (Workers’ Dilemma or «Breaking into a firm’) is edited, some arguments changed, the questions for part B are new.

One of the most important distinctive features of ONYX is a requirement for the respondent to rank arguments and questions instead of rating them as it is in both foreign analogues. Although the original idea of ONYX was inspired by MJT, it is closer in this particular respect to DIT where ranking is also used, but only as a secondary procedure following the rating of the questions provided. The choice for ranking has a fundamental significance and is related to the understanding of the perspectives of the constructivist approach to diagnostics discussed in chapter 1. The requirement for ranking creates a condition for so called forced distribution, used also in Q-sort technique, and serves as a means to amplify the focus on the inner cohesion or intra-connectedness of answers which in turn serves as an indicator of underlying structures. It was the author’s former experience with Q-statistics and the revelation of its huge advantages over the Likert scale that induced the choice. Theoretical biases about forced distribution faded away after extensive practice of Q-sort. Alleged psychological discomfort produced by the insistence on ranking rather than rating items appeared to be overestimated and the benefits gained so much overlooked that the decision to limit respondent’s freedom to distribute answers as s/he wanted came without hesitation. Practice showed that respondents of all ages easily grasp and accept the “rules of the game” concept and refusals to obey the rules in our case were very rare (less than 1%). Moreover, we found that this limitation turned out to be not an inhibitor but on the contrary an additional stimulus for the testee as soon as it converted a routine into a game.

A second fundamentally important and distinctive characteristic of ONYX is the complexity of its resultant index (Y-score). Both MJT and DIT work with patterns of moral reasoning but do it in different ways. Both their approaches are developed via further reduction of the initial Kohlberg idea. ONYX makes a decisive step back to the complexity of Kohlberg’s vision.

When scoring moral judgment competence in his interview, Kohlberg supposed that respondents show a high score 1) if they prefer moral reasoning typical for higher stages, and 2) if they do it with a certain consistency. G. Lind’s dual-aspect theory emphasises this distinction: «As Piaget and Kohlberg maintained, morality must be described in terms of not just one but two fundamentally different aspects» (Lind 2000). Lind called them correspondingly an affective aspect (i.e., the moral attitudes, values and orientations) and a cognitive aspect (i.e., the respondent’s moral competencies to keep these orientations when meeting pro- and contra arguments). Lind (1996) also decided that these two aspects can not only be theoretically distinguished but can also be independently operationalised and measured. MJT was designed to fulfill this task but in the course of its triallinga decision was made to focus only on the cognitive aspect and compute so called C-score (Competence score) to yield the moral reasoning structure. C-score measures cross-situational consistency of moral preferences in judging arguments pro- and contra certain moral actions. Rest et al. on the contrary remained committed to the preference aspect and the P-score (Preference score) of their DIT tells more about the orientation of persons toward a certain type of reasoning than about the consistency of this orientation. «The P score of the DIT provides a percentage score that indicates the amount of post-conventional thinking (in contrast to other kinds of thinking) preferred by the participant» (Narvaez 1998, 15). Critics of DIT including Lind justifiably pointed out the lack of contrast positions in this test and hence the impossibility of taking into account reversibility of moral thinking, i.e., the capacity to recognise the moral merit of opposing viewpoints, while Piaget regarded the development of this very ability of a child’s mind as the most important sign of maturation.

So, roughly speaking, Rest and Lind chose two different but interrelated aspects of moral judgment designated previously by Kohlberg as an undivided skill, and invented ways of computing them as independent variables. ONYX offers a way of computing them together and combines preference and competence scores of these analogues in one integral index of the test yield (Y-score).

To be just, both scholars show strong aspirations for a more integrative approach. It is seen in Rest’s refusal to divide morality into cognitive and affective components. And while he does not always use the term “moral competence” it is quite obvious that DIT is designed to study not merely attitudes toward moral ideas but the cognitive processes and structures underlying these attitudes, which include a sort of moral comprehension and cohesion of judgment as well as knowledge and affect. One citation from Rest and his colleagues is indicative in this respect:

«Like Kohlberg, we affirm a developmental progression from conventionality to postconventionality. A major difference between the Maintaining Norms schema and the Postconventional schema is how each attempts to establish a moral consensus: the strategy of the Maintaining Norms schema is to gain consensus by appealing to established practice and existing authority. In contrast, the strategy of the Postconventional schema is to gain consensus by appealing to ideals and logical coherence (italic mine — F.K.). Like Kohlberg, we assert not only that there are different cognitive structures for moral judgement, but also that they are developmentally ordered» (Rest et al. 2000).

Lind’s approach shows on its side a very clear dynamic toward a more comprehensive vision of moral competence. In his earlier comments on MJT, accessible online, Lind claimed there was «no need for a combined score» that would compute the two aspects of moral judgment together. Within the last decades his rhetoric has considerably changed. He stresses the interconnectedness of the two aspects. The focus of MJT on the «competence aspect» is explained no more via the primary importance of moral competence per se abstracted from preferences but on the contrary via its conjunction with the «attitude aspect»:

“Neither a purely ‘cognitive’ nor a purely ‘affective’ approach to the measurement of moral judgment behavior is warranted. Neither aspect can be adequately assessed without reference to the other. Hence, studies on the parallelism hypothesis which are based on a component model of moral behavior are bound to provide unclear, if not misleading results. <…> The findings show that there is indeed a very strong correlational parallelism of moral cognition and moral affect” (Lind 2006).

Despite Lind’s claim that they use the Moral Judgment Test as an instrument for assessing both aspects simultaneously, in fact this possibility is based only on the parallelism mentioned above. Mathematically MJT is based on a statistic parameter called dispersion (or variance) and is operated with analysis of variance (ANOVA) available through the majority of statistic software programs. This analysis shows the interrelationship of variables within a matrix irrespective of any idea of high and low value. There is no axis of preference in its logic. C-score is high whatever way the moral judgments are ordered or structured. A chaotic arrangement of figures in ANOVA matrix will score zero. As put by Lind (2000), «finally, the different dilemmas contained in the MJT represent different moral demand structures <…> Hence, response consistency and inconsistency indicate properties of a person’s moral-cognitive structure».

The P-score of DIT (the preference for certain stages of moral orientations) is measured in a principally different way. The logic behind it requires an imbalance of favourable and unfavourable judgments. This analysis can be done by simply averaging the participants’ ratings of each stage and weighing up the proportions of them in the data set. Or it can be done via the correlation of the respondent’s distribution of judgments with an etalon distribution.