Advancing the Science of Character Education

Practitioners and researchers have been evaluating the effectiveness of individual character education programs for more than 50 years, and substantial funds have been dedicated to the conduct of these programs. What Works in Character Education literature review (WWCE; Berkowitz and Bier, What works in character education: A research-driven guide for educators. Character Education Partnership, Washington, DC, 2005a; Berkowitz and Bier, What works in character education: A report for policy makers and the media. Character Education Partnership, Washington, DC, 2005b; Berkowitz and Bier, J Res Character Educ 5:29–48, 2007) was the first comprehensive review of these studies. The goal of that review was to determine whether sufficient evidence of character education’s effectiveness existed to warrant the continued investment of very limited school resources. Begun in the year 2000, this initial literature review drew a great deal of interest and revealed not just a national but a global hunger for a science-based approach to character education. Over the years the initial WWCE research team, joined by various colleagues, continued collecting and reviewing the literature (Berkowitz & Bier, Research-based fundamentals of the effective promotion of character development in schools. In: Nucci, Narvaez, Krettenauer (eds) Handbook on moral and character education. Routledge, pp 248–260, 2014), adding a review of the growing number of related literature reviews from fields such as social emotional learning, positive psychology, and prevention science (Berkowitz et al., J Character Educ 13(1):33–51, 2017). In this chapter, we summarize WWCE research, its strengths and weaknesses, and our subsequent efforts to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of character education. We go on to present findings from more recent work using rigorous meta-analytic techniques (Brown et al., J Moral Educ, in press). This work is part of a larger project supported by grant #61178 from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.