Moral Reasoning and Teachers’ Understanding of Individualized Instruction

This was a study to describe teachers’ understanding of individualized instruction. In-depth structured interviews of seven elementary school teachers were collected before and after a two-year MEd programme in which the teachers were involved. The Defining Issues Test (DIT) (a test of cognitive moral development) was also given before and after the programme and the relation between teachers’ understanding and developmental levels assessed. The findings of this study indicate that these teachers had different ways of understanding the idea of individualized instruction and that their understanding could be grouped into two broad categories. Further, there was a positive relation between the two categories and cognitive developmental levels measured on the DIT. This relation held true for both the pre- and post-programme data. The paper discusses alternative interpretations and implications of these findings.