Skills for Ethical Action: A Report on the Program Evaluation, 1976-77

This evaluation report focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of the 38 lessons in the 1976-1977 version of "Skills for Ethical Action," (SEA). SEA is a program based on a set of audiovisual instructional materials developed to teach junior high school students a behavioral strategy for acting ethically. The overall objective of the SEA strategy is to help students "do something which they have decided is fair after considering the possible effects on self and others." The six major steps in the SEA strategy are identifying the value problem, thinking up action ideas, considering self and other, judging, acting, and evaluating. The 38 lessons of SEA instruction evaluated in this report focused on student responsibilities in SEA, case studies about teenagers holding specified values, uses of SEA strategies to handle personal value problems, and use of SEA to make a personal value more meaningful. The evaluation method involved review of all lessons by educators not involved in the project, review of all lessons by SEA staff with particular emphasis on affirmative action aspects of the course, studies of classroom use of SEA, analysis of all students' written SEA class work, and analysis of a questionnaire administered to all students upon completion of the program. The sample consisted of 323 students in 12 junior high school classrooms in four suburban and five urban school districts of a major American city. Findings indicated that students generally liked working with audio cassettes, sometimes reacted negatively to delivery styles of narrators employed on the tapes, found some case studies inappropriate or unrealistic, and felt they learned a lot about consideration for others as a result of participating in the lessons. (DB)