Moral Reasoning and the Moral Actions of School Administrators.

Fifty school administrators completed Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT) and Patterson's Moral Action Choice Test (MACT) as part of a study to determine how Kohlberg's theory of moral development might apply to day-to-day administrative decision-making. The respondents were presented with hypothetical moral dilemmas and asked to explain what they believed they should do, what they actually would do, and what thinking lay behind their responses. The study findings supported the hypothesis that the nature of administrators' responses to the hypothetical problems of the MACT would relate to their levels of moral development as revealed by the DIT scores. The data did not indicate that the administrators who internalized social rules exhibited greater discrepancies between their"should" and "would" responses than did either those treating rules as external or those developing rules from self-chosen principles. As expected, no association was found between DIT and MACT scores when critical moral issues were not confronted. The major implication of the study, according to the authors, is that as problems are conceived less abstractly and more concretely the decisions as to what "should" be done become more strongly dependent on the particular social contexts affected. (PGD)