Appendix C: The reflective practitioner
Saltzstein and his colleagues proposed that when young children show awareness of moral rules, they may be
doing so in the simpler context of moral conflicts. A young child might believe that you should return a dollar to its
owner, even if the child has trouble in practice overcoming a selfish impulse to keep the dollar. The same child
might have trouble deciding, however, whether it is "right" to inform his teacher if a best friend has cheated on a
test. In that case two moral principles compete for attention—honesty and loyalty to a friend. To sort out the
implications of choosing between these principles, a young child might need to rely on older, wiser minds, such as
parents or other adults. The minute that he or she does so, the child is showing the moral heteronomy that Piaget
used to write about and that Saltzstein referred to early in the article.
Understanding these ideas took effort, but once Kelvin began figuring them out, the rest of the article was easier
to follow. In reading the remaining pages, he noted in passing that the researchers used several techniques common
in educational research. For example, they interviewed participants, a common way of gathering systematic
information about individuals' thinking. They also imposed controls on their procedures and on the selection of
participants. Procedures were controlled, for example, by posing the same three moral dilemmas and to all
participants, so that individuals' responses could be compared meaningfully. The selection of participants was
controlled by selecting two age groups for deliberate comparison with each other—one that was seven years old and
the other that was eleven. Since the researchers wanted to generalize about moral development as much as possible,
but they obviously could not interview every child in the world, they sampled participants: they selected a
manageable number (sixty-five, to be exact) from the larger student population of one particular school. In a second
part of the investigation, they also selected a comparable number of children of the same two ages (7 and 11) from
the city of Recife, located in Brazil. The Brazilian group's responses were compared deliberately with the American
group's responses, in order to allow for the impact of cultural beliefs on moral development in general. Kelvin
recognized this research strategy as an example of using control groups. In research terms, the Brazilian group
"controlled for" the impact of American culture on children's moral beliefs, and vice versa, the American group
controlled for the impact of Brazilian culture on children's moral beliefs. Altogether, these techniques helped insure
that the interviews of children's moral beliefs really illustrated what they were supposed to illustrate—that they
were reliable and valid, in the senses that we discussed in earlier chapters. As Kelvin noticed Saltzstein's attention
to good research techniques, he gained confidence in Saltzstein’s observations and in the interpretations that the
authors made from them.
What did Saltzstein and his colleagues find out—or more to the point, what did Kelvin Seifert learn from what
Saltzstein and his colleagues wrote about? There were three ideas that occurred to Kelvin. One was that in everyday
life, children probably deal with moral beliefs of all levels of cognitive complexity, and not just "simple" moral
conflicts and "complex" moral dilemmas. Saltzstein found that children's solutions to moral dilemmas depended a
lot on the content of the dilemma. Children advocated strongly for truthfulness in some situations (for example, in
deciding whether to tell the teacher about a friend's cheating), but not in other situations (like in deciding whether
to back up a friend who is being teased and who has lied in an effort to stop the teasing). But it was rare for all
children to support any one moral principle completely; they usually supported a mix.
Another idea that Kelvin learned from Saltzstein's research was about how children expressed moral
heteronomy versus moral autonomy. Age, it seemed, did not affect the beliefs that children stated; younger and
older children took similar positions on all dilemmas initially. But age did affect how steadfastly children held to
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