Abstract:

Values education is a main objective in schools all over the world. In Germany, this demand is documented in the school curriculum. Even though, values education is important for students, this takes only place when teachers are able to integrate values education in daily school life and in class. Thus, teacher’s values competence is necessary in this context.

Values competence is the ability to consciously transfer values into daily action. This means that the teacher knows according to which values he/she handles, and that he/she is able to justify these actions according to adequate reasons. Teacher’s values competence is of great importance for students’ values education.

One possibility to foster values education in schools are dilemma stories. These are also used to gather data about specific stages on moral development according to Kohlberg (1967). To investigate values competence, we had a closer look on how student teachers handle dilemma stories. In this context, we were interested in the following research questions:
How do student teachers
1. … decide on dilemmas?
1. … justify their decisions?
2. … evaluate their competence when solving the dilemmas?
3. … evaluate their competence to transfer values in class?

In order to answer these questions, we developed two dilemma stories which were relevant in school context: One about the illegal publication of naked pictures of a classmate on Facebook and one about the adoption of a working shift. These dilemmas were integrated into a questionnaire that consisted of four parts. Firstly, demographic data were asked as well as a subjective ranking of important values; second, the first dilemma was provided. Participants had to write their solutions on the questionnaire and also justify this solution. Afterwards, they had to evaluate their values competence regarding this dilemma. Third, a second dilemma was provided with the same questions. Fourth, values transfer competence was asked with a five-point Likert scale using eight items.

Data analyses were twofold: Close questions were quantitatively analyzed with mean and standard deviation while open questions regarding the dilemma solutions and justifications were firstly qualitatively analyzed. A coding scheme was inductively developed from the participants’ answers. Twenty-five per cent of all answers were double-rated. The inter-rater reliability of the first dilemma was .82, and of the second dilemma 1.0, which was very high. In a second step, the categories were quantitatively analyzed using frequencies.
Twenty-five student teachers participated in this study (14 male, 11 female) with an average age of 25. It took them 23 minutes to finish the questionnaire.

Results on research question 1 indicate that students had several ideas to solve the dilemmas, naming 19 diverse ideas in dilemma 1, and 12 in dilemma 2. Results on research question 2 to justify their solutions refer to emotions (e.g. sympathy with the victim) or reciprocity. Results on research question 3 indicate that students felt competent and satisfied with solving the dilemmas showing high mean scores (dilemma 1 mean=4.33; dilemma 2 mean=4.24). Results on research question 4 again show high agreement scores with a mean of 4.3 for the values transfer competence scale.

Looking at our data, we can conclude that student teachers solve dilemma stories to their own satisfaction and are convinced they are able to transfer this values competence into their classroom.

Keywords:

Values competence, student teacher, dilemma story.