Abstract

Values education is fundamental in Malaysia’s national school curriculum as it plays an important function in achieving the aims and visions of the National Philosophy of Education and National Education Curriculum of producing Malaysian citizens who are not only knowledgeable and competent but who possess high moral standards. In fulfilling these national educational aims, values education should be concerned with educating pupils to understand, know or reason and having the emotions and dispositions to act on the values, that is to have the capacities to function as moral agent in the moral sphere. It is in this light on the importance of values education a research on moral reasoning of the adolescents is conducted, focussing on the preferred choice of values, moral stage concerns and moral schemas in moral reasoning on a moral dilemma or situation. The research instrument for this study is one of the dilemmas, namely Heinz Dilemma, in the Defining Issues Test or DIT (1986). The sample consisted of 5152 respondents, namely 899 18 year-old and 4253 16 year-old Malaysian adolescents. The moral reasoning of the respondents are cross-tabulated with selected dependent variables, namely age, gender, location, family’s monthly income, father’s and mother’s level of education for differences in moral reasoning. This research is part of a national study on Cognitive and Psychosocial Profile of Malaysian Adolescents funded by Ministry of Science and Technology, Malaysia.