The Importance of Character Education: a Study of Increased Structure and Focused Character Education in Morning Meetings

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine whether increasing the structure of morning meetings with a character education focus would reduce office referrals among students with behavior problems. This study used a retrospective pre-experimental design with a variant of a one-group pretest-posttest design. Subjects (n= 19) served as their own controls. Subjects were selected based on a “high” score on the dependent variable under the first condition in that they had two or more office referrals in the first semester of the school year and were considered frequent offenders. Dependent variable data was collected over the first semesters of the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 school years in an elementary school. In 2011-2012 study morning meetings were unstructured but in 2012-2013 they were structured with a character education focus. There was no significant difference between the mean number of office referrals in the first semester of the school year among frequent offenders under nonstructured (Mean = 3.58, SD = 1.54) and structured (Mean= 2.37, SD = 2.31) morning meeting conditions [t(18) = 1.99, p > .05]. Implications are discussed including that more funding is needed to provide every classroom teacher with a research based character education program and materials and the need to conduct more rigorous research to assess the effectiveness of the intervention.