Investigating the Efficacy of Interactive Ethics Education: A Difference in Pedagogical Emphasis

This study employs an experimental design to investigate the efficacy of a new approach to ethics training- "interactive" ethics education. After random assignment to groups of 135 real estate licensees from four different firms, the treatment group received specialized, interactive ethics instruction, while the control group did not. The two groups were tested in terms of both their general level of cognitive moral development using Rest's defining issues test (DIT) and their industry-specific level of moral development using the real estate survey (RES). Although a pretest indicated that there was no significant difference in levels of cognitive moral development between the control and treatment groups, there was a significant difference between the two groups in terms of both DIT and RES after the completion of the interactive training session.