Moral Reasoning in Young Children: A Review of Research into Intentionality and Implications for Education

This article reviews recent investigations into intentionality (use of motive information) in young children's moral judgements. Intentionality has been shown to vary as a function of the nature of the vignette used in assessment and the manner in which the vignette is presented. Research has disclosed that young children can reliably use motive information in moral evaluations and that this capability can be facilitated through training experiences. The edu-cational implications of Piagetian theory and cognitive social learning theory for moral development are discussed. Although the scientific study of children's moral reasoning has attracted a good deal of research in recent years, it is apparent that the major develop-mental analysis of young children's moral concepts appeared almost fifty years ago. In a monograph first published in 1932, Piaget (1977) identified two significant orientations in the development of children's moral thinking and published a methodology for their assessment. Heteronomous morality, other-wise known as the morality of constraint or moral realism, is characterize