A Novel Approach to Business Ethics Training: Improving Moral Reasoning in Just a Few Weeks

I assessed change in students’ moral reasoning following five 75-min classes on business ethics and two assignments utilizing a novel pedagogical approach designed to foster ethical reasoning skills. To minimize threats to validity present in previous studies, an untreated control group design with preand posttraining measures was used. Training (n = 114) and control (n = 76) groups comprised freshmen business majors who completed the Defining Issues Test before and after the training. Results showed that, controlling for pretraining levels of moral reasoning, students in the training group demonstrated higher levels of post-training principled moral judgment than students in the control group.