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Children's rule discrimination within the context of the school
Author(s) -
BuchananBarrow Eithne,
Barrett Martyn
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1998.tb00770.x
Subject(s) - psychology , developmental psychology , context (archaeology) , moral development , moral reasoning , social psychology , function (biology) , social environment , sociology , paleontology , evolutionary biology , biology , social science
Following Turiel's (1983) proposal of two distinct conceptual domains of social thinking, the moral and the social‐conventional, research has revealed that children acquire competent rule‐differentiation abilities at a very early age within the family context (Smetana & Braeges, 1990; Smetana, Schlagman & Adams, 1993). This study investigated children's rule‐understanding within the context of the school by examining children's judgements of a range of infringements by schoolchildren, involving both moral and social‐conventional rules. Children, aged 5–11 years, from four primary schools, assessed six hypothetical rule‐breaking scenarios, two moral and four socio‐conventional, according to the traditional criteria. However, in order to probe the children's differentiation skills beyond a simple dichotomy between moral and socio‐conventional, the four socio‐conventional infringements were sub‐divided between two rules with discernible purpose and two rules where the function was unclear or more arbitrary. There were two main findings: (1) the children displayed competent and complex rule‐discrimination abilities with minimal age differences, not only differentiating between the moral and socio‐conventional but also perceiving significant differences between the two types of socio‐conventional rules; (2) the children also revealed a clear sense of the authority competencies of head teachers and teachers, again largely unaffected by age. However, despite these overall levels of rule understanding, there were some individual differences in the moral thinking of some of the younger children, possibly as a consequence of aspects of the school system.