The Moral Development Scale: A Piagetian Measure of Moral Judgment

This paper reports the development and standardization of Piagetian measure of moral judgment, the Moral Development Scale (MDS). The MDS is an individually administered set of tasks designed to assess the overall level of moral reasoning within a Piagetian framework. Evidence for the reliability and validity of scale was obtained by individually administering the MDS to four samples (total N = 270) of children. Overall, the results of the data analysis indicate that the scale has adequate psychometric properties. Data are presented on the scale's reliability and validity as well as norms derived from the cross-validation sample.