More Than Just a Good Book: Employing U.S. Department of Education Guidelines to Teach Character Education Using Literature

The purpose of this research study, which was conducted as a qualitative content analysis, was to discover to what extent children\u27s literature from a popular anthology could be used to teach the tenets of character education according to U.S. Department of Education (2005) guidelines in a pre-Kindergarten through second grade setting. A team of participant-coders, which consisted of experienced early childhood educators, evaluated and analyzed each of the 44 complete books contained in the 320 page anthology, The 20th Century Children\u27s Book Treasury: Celebrated Picture Books and Stories to Read Aloud (Schulman, 2005), in order to investigate opportunities to explore with students the 10 values identified by U.S. Department of Education guidelines. Data collection consisted of: (a) ratings in a codebook, (b) narrative notes, and (c) discussions with participant-coders. In the report of research findings, a summary for each book was provided to determine the applicability of the themes to character education. Based on the content analysis of the 44 books in the anthology, The 20th Century Children\u27s Book Treasury: Celebrated Picture Books and Stories to Read Aloud, it was determined that 26 (59%) of the stories in it contained at least 1 of the character traits suggested by the U.S. Department of Education