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The document discusses the nature of moral judgment, reviews previous studies which link higher education to moral judgment, and presents results of a longitudinal study comparing college and non-college subjects. This project report from the Higher Education and Cognitive-Social Development Project at the University of Minnesota is presented in three sections. In Section I the motivational and cognitive theories of moral education are discussed. In the motivational theory, the goal of moral education is to change the individual's motives from selfish, impulsive, and unsocial to altruistic, disciplined, and social. The cognitive theory portrays the goal of education as developing the individual's understanding about how people interact with each other. Lawrence Kohlberg's six stages of moral development and a review of research on cognitive development are presented. Section II summarizes research on the impact of higher education on moral judgment as measured by the Defining Issues Test (DIT), which constitutes the largest data base on a single measure of moral judgment. Results indicate that changes in moral development occur over long periods of time and apparently not through the teaching of specific doctrines. Section III reports results of a longitudinal study by the author to determine if college students show greater gains in moral judgment development than non-college students. The 59 subjects were tested during high school, two years after, then four years after the initial test. Thirty-eight subjects had gone to college, 18 had not (for three subjects the classification was ambiguous). Participants in the third testing completed the DIT, the Comprehension of Moral Concepts Test, Law and Order Political Attitudes, and a "life history." Results indicate that higher education fosters development in moral judgment, particularly at the four year mark. (Author/KC)

These conference proceedings of the Association for Moral Education contain papers on the evaluation of moral development and of moral education programs at all levels. In section I, "Evaluating Moral Education Perspectives and Examples," models of moral development that have influenced theory and practice during the past ten years are described and contrasted, and new directions in evaluating specific moral education programs are illustrated. Specific instruments and techniques that have been developed to assess moral reasoning are then described. Of all the instruments presented, only Kohlberg's Moral Judgment Instrument and James Rest's Defining Issues Test have been extensively validated. Section II on "Alternative Modes for Assessing Moral Judgment" describes Kohlberg's Moral Judgment Instrument, includes an interview with Kohlberg on the history of his sequential stage theory and his current thinking and reviews the Defining Issues Test which is the most widely used measure of moral judgment. Also included in this section is a description of a new measure called the Socio-Moral Reflection Measure and discussions of efforts to create instruments that integrate the evaluation of both content and growth in moral reasoning in a single measure. Section two concludes with two descriptions of more global evaluation strategies. The third and final section "Evaluation Strategies for Programs with a Value Dimension" deals with issues of integrating moral education into the curriculum of the schools. (Author/RM)