Abstract:

Introduction:
Academic education in Slovakia is following a new trend, namely the integrity of moral reasoning and critical thinking. One of the partial goals of the extensive research aimed to find out connections between critical thinking and moral reasoning was to identify the current level of moral reasoning of future teachers. Although there are studies in Slovakia presenting moral reasoning, they are not related to critical thinking. The basic goal was to identify and analyze the current level of moral judgment of teacher students.

Methods and respondents:
The basic measurement tool was The Moral Competence Test (Lind, 2009). The basic group consisted of students of all teacher training programmes at the University of Prešov in Prešov (N = 761). Through the group selection, we selected n = 241 respondents (13 groups). These were the students of various study combinations of teacher programmes who attended compulsory study subjects of pedagogical-psychological basis. Testing was realized in October, academic year 2020/2021.

Results:
Women (future teachers; n = 158) in moral reasoning achieved on average a higher C-index (M = 21.68; SD = 13.06) than men (n = 83; M = 20.13; SD = 12, 56). Overall, no statistically significant differences were demonstrated. The average gross C-score of the entire sample of students was M = 21.15 (SD = 12.88), which proves teacher students´ medium level of moral reasoning. In the study, we discuss selected variables and confront them with current foreign results, which proves that foreign students achieve much higher C-scores than Slovak students.

Conclusion:
The basic recommendation is to innovate the pedagogical-psychological preparation of teacher faculties in the context of changing the curriculum, creating new information sheets of university courses supporting moral judgment as part of quality critical thinking.

Keywords:

Moral reasoning, moral competence, innovative challenges of education.