Relationship Between Students’ Moral Development and their Academic Achievement: An Extension of Kohlberg’s Theory

Abstract

Moral development is the basic requirement of an educational system. The overall progress of as society based on its effective process of education which is consisted on valuable contents, devoted teachers, and purposeful activities and as a result a skilful, honest and useful citizen can be produced. The current study is based on two variables moral development and academic achievement of secondary and higher secondary level students of Fazaia colleges. The purpose of study is to gauge the moral development of students of 15 to 19 age ( girls and boys) and  teachers according to the moral stages  given by Kohlberg, in his theory of moral development.  The sample of study was the students (male /female) of SSCII (10^th) and HSSCII (12^th) Level and teachers of compulsory subjects’ i.e. Urdu, English, Islamiat and Pak Studies of Fazaia Inter colleges. To gauge the moral development of students and teachers, data was collected by the 6-point ranking scale (1-6).The academic achievement was gauged from the most recent board examination marks.  One thousand questionnaires were distributed among the students, 24 questionnaires were distributed among the teachers. The collected data was analyzed by using different statistical technique i.e. descriptive statistics, t-test, Kendall-tau and Partial Correlation. The data was presented in the graphic form of clustered frequency bar graphs of priority wise option selection, as well as level/Score wise pie chart representation. The overall average Kohlberg Score for the Students is 3.7017, which is Stage- 3 Interpersonal Accord & Conformity lying in the Conventional Level-II. This is in line with the thinking of majority of the students as meeting the expectations of others plays a vital role in our Culture and Society. It was seen that no student had an overall average of more than 5 or less than 1.5. The study depicts that the students who have performed better in the Moral Development Test had also obtained high Academic scores. As per the result obtained a moderate correlation does exist between Moral Development and Academic Achievement. The study revealed that variation in moral level was present for both high and low grade students though a weak relation was present for the secondary; level students that hinted the students with higher grades usually also had better moral scores. Students were observed to have a higher moral score than that of the teachers and girls’ moral development scores were better than boys.