Education Commons^™

The essay asks whether contemporary Western empirical studies of moral education, as exemplified in the distinctive research programs of Lawrence Kohlberg and Martin Hoffman, can enter into productive dialogue with the Neo-Confucian theories of Zhu Xi (1130-1200). The proposed dialogue proceeds in two stages. I begin with Zhu’s notion of “lesser learning” and the role therein of ritual, and consider their relations to Kohlberg’s ideas about the construction of moral rules and Hoffman’s findings concerning parental discipline (and particularly “induction”). The second stage turns to Zhu’s “greater learning” and its central concept of reverence, which I explain is best understood …

Multiple studies have shown the strong predictive power of high school grade point average (HSGPA) in forecasting future academic performance outcomes. However, the methods for calculating HSGPAs vary among schools, with some employing weighted methods in their calculations and others using unweighted scales. Due to these inconsistencies, it is often difficult to compare HSGPAs across high schools. This study involved the coding of 551 high school transcripts of pre-med college students in Texas. Unweighted HSGPAs were then calculated for each of these students on a standard 4.0 scale. Three multiple regression models were then created for the students with complete …