West Virginia Department of Education s4

Abstract

West Virginia Department of Education

Integrating Effective Character Education Programs into Rural Schools:

Measuring A Replicable Model

There is an abundance of literature that hypothesizes and supports the significance of character education programs in relation to more caring and productive classrooms (Benninga, Berkowitz,, Kuehn, & Smith, 2003). However, on the road to integrating beneficial character education initiatives, resistance frequently is encountered. Educators often report that character education programs require unrealistic amounts of time, unavailable monies for funding the efforts, and distract from the existing curriculum essential to meeting state requirements for “No Child Left Behind.” Therefore, the West Virginia Department of Education’s (WVDE) proposal in cooperation with West Virginia University (WVU) and the following counties: Clay, Boone, Summers, and Tyler propose the following objectives for this project: (1) identify obstacles and create new avenues that bypass the barriers to implementing character education, (2) produce a resource (i.e., manual and web site) that provides affordable and easier accessibility to effective character education programs, (3) integrate character education programs into existing educational efforts, and (4) quantitatively and qualitatively measure the effects of the project through rigorous scientific inquiry.

Our goal is to study the effects of this project on a randomly selected sample of K-12 schools from the four rural counties mentioned above in West Virginia. The first step will be to select the schools and teachers that will represent the experimental and control group samples. Utilizing a quasi-experimental longitudinal design we will measure the progress of participants in these schools over a three-year time period. This project hopes to identify positive progress due to training Character Development Teams (CDT) from each of the experimental schools, which include an administrator, a county administrator, teachers, a counselor, parents, and community/business members in the implementation of character education, and exposing youth to more positive role models and the character traits representative of responsible citizens.