Seventy-five years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948, it is well worth re-visiting a text that constitutes an undeniable point of reference for Western societies and a beacon for the present and future of our cultures. Specifically, Article 26.2 defines the purpose of education as:

the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

Beyond a doubt, at the heart of these great words lies a deep ethical component that emanates from the idea of full development of the personality, which encompasses the full range of dimensions of the person (Ibáñez-Martín, 2017), as well as the educational duty to promote values with a high moral charge in individuals and groups of people as a way to maintain peaceful coexistence, a high level good so strongly sought in our times (Alderdice, 2021).

Recent years have witnessed a renewed pedagogical interest in the ethical dimension of education, as seen in the increasing number of publications on this subject and the appearance of different interdisciplinary models, approaches, and methodologies that provide new insights to interpreting and developing ethical learning (Conroy, 2021; Ruiz-Corbella & García-Gutiérrez, 2023). Current trends include the perspective of gender and educational inclusion (Lee, 2022), new ways and proposals for teacher training (Higgins, 2011), questions about political polarization in the early 21st century and its threat to the quality of democracies and the exercise of citizenship (Cortina, 2022), the role played by digital technologies in civics (D’Olimpio, 2017), the contributions of neurology to education (Narvaez, 2019), and pressing concerns about social justice and sustainability (Schinkel, 2023), among others.

Specifically, the emergence of different approaches that advocate that «educating the whole person is more than a rhetorical growth» (Higgins, 2022, p. 87) seems steeped in the very heart of the word ‘education’. This conception covers the first levels of the education system with approaches such as Whole Child Development (WCD), defined as:

a holistic development approach with the goal to educate the whole child, physically, socially, emotionally, and academically, with the active engagement and support of the community. The WCD approach recognises that all children, particularly those facing extreme adversity, require a range of knowledge, skills, experiences, and core values that will enable them to engage as productive and ethical citizens (Tarricone et al., 2020, p. 7).

It has gained notable relevance in some conceptions of higher education that place ethics on the main lines of what it means to be a university student (Esteban Bara & Caro Samada, 2023), fostered by sharp critics such as the former dean of Harvard College, Harry R. Lewis, in his book on university education titled Excellence without a Soul (2007). According to Lewis, a professor of computer science, the university should be understood as a distinctive opportunity for students to grow, one that balances intellectual and moral development for the purpose of seeking out vital horizons of meaningfulness, with a civic, engaged view to the society they inhabit (Lewis, 2007).

Likewise noteworthy is the emergence of an Aristotelian conception of character education (Walker et al., 2015) motivated by a renewed interest in the ethics of virtue that began in the mid-20th century, the repercussions of which are still being felt today (Curren, 2010). Its development is evident in recent work done by large-scale international research such as the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Oxford Character Project at the University of Oxford, the Center for Character and Citizenship at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (USA), the Aretai Center on Virtues at the Università degli Studi di Genoa (Italy), and the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham (UK). Over the last decade, the Jubilee Centre has gained notable relevance, fostering collaboration among teachers, school administrators, and leaders from teachers’ unions (namely, the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) and the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), each with around 50,000 and 21,000 members, respectively), families, social organizations, young people, etc. to draw up a Character Education Framework Guidance (2019), promoted by the British Government’s Department of Education. Its aim consisted in providing guidelines and recommendations to help English schools self-assess their current and future actions for character education, understood as the educational action to promote the «spiritual, moral, social, and cultural (SMSC) development of pupils and prepare them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life» (Department of Education, 2019, p. 4).

One factor explaining the widespread acceptance of these pedagogical proposals with a major ethical component is their consistency with Article 26.2 of the aforementioned United Nations Declaration, considering that full development of the human personality must contemplate the person’s different dimensions, where ethical learning is located, although neither exclusively nor in isolation from the rest. For example, the Jubilee Centre (2022), in Aristotelian terms, identifies four sweeping domains or types of virtues in character development. These domains encompass the intellectual virtues (focused on discerning correct action and knowledge and understanding of reality), virtues that are specifically moral (that allow us to act on an idea of the good in situations that require an ethical response), civic virtues (necessary for exercising responsible citizenship committed to the common good), and instrumental or performative virtues, which lack any ethical value in and of themselves but are nevertheless essential for acquiring the rest of the virtues. In this Aristotelian view, character is not conceived as something monolithic, nor exclusively or even mainly cognitive or intellectual, as so commonly occurred with Kohlberg-based approaches in the late 20th century. Rather, it incorporates the affective or emotional component as a mainstay of development, linked to the behavioral and the rational, the ethical weight of which in human development must be justified (Kristjánsson, 2018). In addition, the second noteworthy factor in the emergence of character education is its interdisciplinary origin and development, which starts off from philosophy but is not limited to it. Instead, it welcomes contributions from contemporary psychology, especially positive and humanistic psychology (Kristjánsson, 2015). To overcome a dichotomy that separated and confronted them, these disciplines have looked to current proposals such as neo-Aristotelian character education and like-minded conceptions such as Self Determination Theory (Ryan et al., 2013) for a common space of confluence and collaboration in which they obtain a mutual benefit that directly affects education.

One of the most important challenges and at the same time one of the most complex, faced by all the different proposals and models of education that consider ethical learning to be essential, is how to assess it. Indeed, assessing the achievement of the objectives of any educational activity or project in order to identify success factors or apply corrective actions constitutes of them basic pillars of education. Thus, the traditionally more empirical approach of psychology (Kristjánsson, 2015) requires pedagogy to have a way of validating its methodologies based largely (though not exclusively) on the results obtained, thereby providing the most objective evidence possible of its effectiveness. However, aspirations to objective assessment in education entail a number of different problems that need considering. First and foremost, as López-Gómez (2016) states, assessment is not only measuring or scoring, since not everything that is assessable can be considered measurable. In other words, not everything that needs to be assessed can be measured by strictly objective means and quantified into numbers: «the richness of teaching and learning is hard to measure and synthesize in a number» (López-Gómez, 2016, p. 199). And if this first problem can be extended to learning in general, the scientific literature and the teaching practice find it particularly difficult to apply to one of its dimensions: ethical learning.

Different authors note that the complexity of ethical learning demands similarly complex methods and instruments of evaluation, ones not limited to any single quantitative or qualitative approach. Rather, a multifaceted approach to a multidimensional phenomenon, be it cognitive, behavioral, emotional, etc., requires mixing methods and even having different evaluators that can triangulate different perspectives from a variety of different contexts (García-Gutiérrez et al., 2018; Harrison et al., 2016; Reyero, 2014). And yet, in practice we find an overabundance of self-assessment questionnaires that consist only of self-observation, which itself brings in its own set of associated problems. For one, the individual turns into both the judge and object of the evaluation, with his/her own interests in obtaining certain results. Moreover, even if we accept a subject’s supposed neutrality and objectivity in evaluating him/herself, there is no guarantee his/her evaluation is accurate: the learner may overestimate or underestimate his/her ethical skills in connection with low self-esteem or a personal bias for self-confirmation (Kristjánsson, 2015).

Another noteworthy aspect concerns the difficulty of isolating the object of evaluation, since it does not appear in the person independently from his/her traits, behaviors, emotions, etc. Rather, they are all integrated and in continuous interaction, making it difficult to accurately point out the internal or external causes motivating them (Alexander, 2016; Wright et al., 2020). For example, to determine how ethically desirable a given behavior is, it would not suffice to observe it in a learner; rather, it is necessary to find out if it is motivated by other ethically justified reasons than merely by chance, or even worse, by spurious interests (Miller, 2018). In that sense, the influence of context also constitutes a key factor in ethical learning, so much so that some authors claim that character is completely dependent upon environmental characteristics, which has come to be known as situationalism (Merrit et al., 2010).

This is what makes the evaluation of ethical learning one of the main challenges on which there is little or no agreement in the scientific literature (Arthur et al., 2017). It requires a painstaking degree of rigor and high levels of systematization and experimentality by means of pre-testing and post-testing and control groups (Kristjánsson, 2015), which has led some authors such as Curren and Kotzee (2014) to wonder whether this type of measuring is even possible. In this regard, any achievement of the goals for full development of personality as laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights may be cobbled by our not yet having an evidence-based understanding of the most effective methods for assessing ethical learning. And yet, there is still no extensive research on the methods used to assess ethical learning that gives a broad perspective of the current situation and provides reliable knowledge of the conditions in which this type of assessment is being carried out (the methods and instruments used, the procedures, the degree of experimentality, the most habitual recipients and their socio-demographic characteristics, the contexts and settings in which the assessment is done, etc.).

Consequently, the general aim of this article is to analyze the didactic conditions and strategies used to assess ethical learning by means of scientific evidence from the international professional literature in recent years. The specific aims are the following:

• To identify the assessment methods and agents used most often in current research on ethical learning.

• To detect the main approaches to assessing ethic learning used in current scientific research.

• To categorize the preferred assessment instruments by number and type of tool.

• To examine the degree of experimentality of the research on ethical learning.

• To determine the main countries where studies are carried out on the assessment of ethical learning today.

• To describe the sociodemographic characteristics of the subjects comprising the samples of participants in research on the assessment of ethical learning.

• To determine the fundamental elements of ethics that are assessed in current research carried out on this topic.

The selection criteria followed integrates the scientific articles published between 2018 and 2022 in the Scopus database. Once a sufficient sample was obtained, the scope of the research is not widened to other databases nor is any other time period considered.

Table 1 below lists the criteria adopted in greater detail:

Table 1
Search criteria determined for selecting articles

The articles were selected in four stages, on the basis of the previously defined criteria. The first stage set the equation to search for articles in the SCOPUS database published between 2018 and 2022 that contained the descriptors «character education» or «educación del carácter» and «evaluation» or «evaluación».

In the second stage the results from the first stage were filtered to only include the following keywords: «morality»; «moral education»; «ethics»; «virtue»; «morals»; «evaluation»; «character building»; «values»; «moral development»; «values education»; «civic education»; «program evaluation»; «virtues»; «character strengths»; «moral character»; «citizenship education»; «meta-analysis» and «student character».

In the third stage, only articles belonging to the sub-area of «Social Sciences» were selected.

The last stage of the data extraction process consisted of analyzing the content of the abstract of each article. The ones selected contained procedures, programs, and systems for assessing ethical behavior, character education, and/or moral education.

Figure 1 below features a diagram of the process followed for obtaining the final sample:

Figure 1
Stages for article selection

Once the final sample was obtained (n=69), a database was created using Microsoft Excel as an analysis instrument. From that database, the content of the articles was analyzed attending to the previously determined variables. The bibliographic references of the sample are provided in Appendix 1.

The variables in Table 2 below were used to analyze the content of the articles from the final sample.

Table 2
Classification of variables used in the extraction of data

First, regarding the modality of evaluation, 91% of the research articles analyzed were found to follow an individual method, 6% were done in group mode, and 3% apply a mixed method of both individual and group. Regarding agents of evaluation, 65% use self-assessment whereas 25% make use of hetero-assessment and 19% use co-assessment. In terms of the type of evaluation, 63 studies specify the type, with the following results: 35% use a quantitative methodology, 30% work with a qualitative methodology, and 35% use a mixed methodology. Six studies do not specify the type of methodology used.

To analyze the evaluation instruments used, the number of tools was differentiated from the tool type. Thus, 25 research articles (37%) use a single instrument, another 25 (37%) apply two instruments, and 17 (25%) make use of three or more instruments. The tool used most often is the questionnaire, which makes up 51% of all instruments, in contrast to interviews (17%) and observation (12%). The remaining 20% use other instruments, which include focus groups, case studies, descriptive analyses, moral dilemmas, pictures, traditional games, etc. Of the research that uses the interview, 14 specify which type: seven use semi-structured interviews, five use in-depth interviews, one uses the open-ended interview and one uses two types of interviews: semi-structured and in-depth.

The results regarding the design of the study specify the degree of experimentality, the number of number of evaluations carried out in each research article, and the length of the intervention programs.

Regarding the degree of experimentality, 23 of the research articles analyzed (34%) applied pretesting and post-testing, whereas 44 (66%) did not. Furthermore, only 10 used a control group (15%) whereas 57 (85%) do not.

Regarding the number of evaluations carried out in the research, 25 studies (36%) performed two evaluations, 17 (25%) applied one single evaluation, 12 studies (17%) make reference to three evaluations, two studies (3%) performed five evaluations, two (3%) carried out four evaluations, and one (1%) study applied six evaluations.

The data on the length of the intervention programs are as follows: of the 69 research articles, 27 (39%) carried out intervention programs of a specific length. Specifically, three (11%) featured a length of less than one month, six interventions (22%) lasted between one and three months, eight (30%) of the research articles were done on programs lasting between three and six months, eight (30%) had a length ranging from six to twelve months, and one research article (4%) was based on an intervention program lasting between 12 months and six years. In contrast, 42 research articles (61%) do not specify the length of the intervention programs or do not evaluate the effects of a particular program.

Lastly, Figure 2 below lists the countries where the research articles in the sample were carried out, when specified:

Figure 2
Countries in which the research was carried out

Regarding the categories of the participants of the research, the findings are as follows: in a clear majority of the studies analyzed, 49 (74%) evaluate one single type of participant. Of all the participants, 53% are students, 23% are faculty, and 24% belong to other population groups (management teams, people employed at higher education institutions, alumni, education experts, educational administrators, inspection personnel, women, professional guidance counselors, and family).

As to the number of participants, the median of all the samples is 215 subjects. Of the 83 samples, 51 (61%) were found to number fewer than 100 individuals, 22 (27%) had between 100 and 500 individuals, six samples (7%) had 500 to 1000 individuals, and four (5%) had a sample size of 1000 to 3023. The ages of the participants in the samples range from three to 66 years old; regarding level of education, most (39%) are adults (without specifying their level of education), postgraduate students (20%), primary school pupils (19%), secondary education students (16%), children in early childhood education (4%), and students in primary and secondary together (1%).

Of the 69 research articles, 11 used two samples, four had three samples, and one had four different samples.

Regarding the elements that the studies aimed to assess, 66 research articles (97%) clearly stated them, in contrast to two (3%) that avoided specifying them. The elements most often evaluated are perceptions, which appear 27 times in different studies and make up 25% of the elements evaluated by all the research. Skills appear 25 times (24%), cognitive thinking appears on 24 occasions (23%), beliefs are evaluated 18 times (17%), attitudes appear on nine occasions (8%), disposition at two moments (2%), and motivations appear only once (1%). In addition, 30 studies (45%) were found to evaluate one single element of the ones noted above, 32 research articles covered two dimensions (48%), and four articles (6%) took three elements into account.

Lastly, in the 69 total research articles, a total of 136 thematic areas of evaluation were found. Of them, 30 (14%) assess character education; all the rest relate to ethical learning in a wide variety of thematic areas.