A Meta-Analysis of the What Works in Character Education Research

The What Works in Character Education project (WWCE; Berkowitz & Bier, 2007) was a descriptive summary of significant findings in the empirical literature on character education for the period 1945 to 2004. It employed a broad definition of character education to include related positive youth development programs such as socioemotional learning. Drawing on studies carried out in K–12 education settings, it encompassed research on published character development curricula as well as research on particular instructional practices such as moral discussion and cooperative learning. The current meta-analysis revisits WWCE by applying meta-analytic techniques to the same set of studies collected as part of the WWCE review. While the current analysis did not include any studies not covered by WWCE, it did modify its approach to examining 5 systematic reviews for which Berkowitz and Bier (2007) looked to the overall conclusions. In contrast, the current analysis expanded these reviews to individually examine each of their respective studies. It complements the already substantial referencing and discussion of the WWCE that exists in the character education literature. Random effects meta-analysis of the original WWCE studies examined 836 comparisons across 64 studies involving 96,930 participants and yielded a small but statistically significant average effect size, g = 0.33, 95% CI = 0.21, 0.45. This finding is consistent with prior evidence on the effect size associated with various educational interventions (Lipsey & Wilson, 1993) and reaffirms that character education, as conceptualized and analyzed in the original WWCE, is effective in positively influencing character outcomes. The metaanalytic techniques also yielded new evidence of substantial heterogeneity of effects across studies, suggesting the potential value of focusing more narrowly, in future meta-analyses, on the character education programs that appear most promising. In the meta-analysis reported here, there were also indications of possible bias in some studies’ reporting of results, but overall conclusions regarding effectiveness remaine valid even after correcting for possible bias