The Moral Thinking of Secondary Students in the Brazilian Schooling Context

In the last decades, proponents of Character Education have criticized its overly individualized focus at the expense of individuals’ cultural and social contexts implicated in character growth. Thus, the present study investigates two Brazilian secondary schools to identify how individual (gender, religion, family circumstances, and socioeconomic status) and school (school ethics and school type) differences impact students’ moral reasoning performance. The study employs the Intermediate Concept Measure for Adolescents (AD-ICM) and provides relevant findings associated with adolescents’ moral reasoning, types of school, and social contexts.