Character Education Programs for Kids: What Research Shows

Most American schools run some version of character education. Elementary hallways display posters about respect, responsibility, and integrity. Weekly assemblies feature student awards for demonstrating the character trait of the month. Purchased curricula organize lessons around virtues. Middle schools post the six pillars of CHARACTER COUNTS!. In many districts, character education has its own budget line, its own coordinator, and its own assessment cycle.

The research on whether this produces what it claims to produce — genuine character development in children, not just situational compliance — is more complicated than the programs’ marketing suggests. Some approaches show meaningful outcomes. Others show that children can demonstrate excellent program-appropriate behavior in school while making decisions in the parking lot that the virtue posters had nothing to do with. Understanding the difference requires getting clear on what character education actually is, what conditions produce real moral development, and what the evidence from the best-designed studies shows.

Key Takeaways

• Character education is not a single approach — SEL, virtue ethics education, civic education, and religiously-grounded moral education all travel under this label with different evidence bases.
• Berkowitz and Bier’s 2004 meta-analysis, the most comprehensive review of school character education research, found that effective programs shared specific features — none of which are universally present in commercial programs.
• CHARACTER COUNTS! and similar programs show behavioral compliance in structured settings but limited evidence of moral internalization or transfer to novel contexts.
• The conditions that reliably produce genuine character development — moral reasoning practice, adult modeling, autonomy-supportive environments, and meaningful community service — are largely outside the control of any purchased program.
• Social-emotional learning (SEL) and character education overlap substantially, but the evidence base for SEL is considerably stronger because SEL programs are more commonly evaluated with randomized designs.
• What parents do at home has a far larger effect on moral development than any school character program — and the research specifies what those behaviors look like.

What Character Education Actually Is

The term “character education” covers a range of approaches that differ substantially in theory, practice, and evidence.

Virtue education is rooted in Aristotelian moral philosophy. It holds that character is formed by habit — that repeatedly acting with honesty, courage, or kindness develops the corresponding virtue as a stable disposition. School programs in this tradition teach named virtues, tell stories exemplifying them, and create opportunities to practice them.

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is an approach focused on building identifiable social and emotional competencies: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness. SEL emerged partly from psychology and education research, has its own evidence base, and is often implemented alongside or in lieu of traditional virtue education. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has published meta-analyses of SEL outcomes across hundreds of schools. This is a distinct approach with considerably stronger research than most character education programs, covered in depth in the social-emotional learning research.

Civic character education emphasizes duties and responsibilities within democratic communities — service, civic participation, respectful disagreement, rule-following as a social contract. It has overlap with both virtue education and civics instruction.

Religious/values-based education grounds moral formation in religious tradition, community, and scriptural ethics. It has the longest track record of any approach and some of the strongest observational evidence for outcomes like prosocial behavior, but most of this comes from religious communities where many factors co-occur, making it impossible to attribute outcomes to any specific program element.

Most commercial character education programs sold to public schools — CHARACTER COUNTS!, Positive Action, Second Step, PBIS-aligned character components — blend elements of virtue education and SEL within secular frameworks. Understanding which approach a program uses matters for evaluating what evidence applies.

What the Berkowitz and Bier Meta-Analysis Found

Berkowitz and Bier’s 2004 analysis, published by the Character Education Partnership, reviewed 33 research-based character education programs, examining 69 outcomes across hundreds of studies. It is the most frequently cited academic review of character education research and the foundation for claims about “evidence-based” character education.

Their analysis found that programs showing evidence of effectiveness shared several features: they were multiyear rather than one-year programs; they involved explicit skill instruction (not just virtue naming); they used active learning methods (service learning, discussion, role-play) rather than passive delivery; they involved parent engagement alongside school programming; and they created school environments that modeled the values taught — schools where adults consistently demonstrated the virtues being taught to students.

The programs that showed evidence of positive outcomes (reduced aggression, improved prosocial behavior, reduced drug use, improved academic performance) were also mostly programs with specific curriculum designs and trained facilitators — not off-the-shelf poster-and-assembly approaches.

Importantly, the meta-analysis found that behavioral outcomes were more consistently demonstrated than attitude or value internalization outcomes. Programs could show reduced observable aggression or increased helping behavior in structured settings without demonstrating that students had genuinely internalized moral reasoning that would guide their behavior in novel, unobserved situations. This is the compliance-vs.-character distinction that critics of commercial programs emphasize.

CHARACTER COUNTS! Program Evidence

CHARACTER COUNTS! is one of the most widely adopted character education frameworks in American public schools. Developed by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, it organizes character into six “pillars”: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. It is implemented in thousands of schools through posters, lesson plans, assemblies, and recognition systems.

The evidence for CHARACTER COUNTS! is modest. A 2010 evaluation by Walker and colleagues, examining CHARACTER COUNTS! implementation in seven schools over three years, found no significant differences in disciplinary incidents, academic performance, or parent-reported behavioral outcomes between CHARACTER COUNTS! schools and comparison schools. Self-reported character trait endorsement (students saying they valued honesty, for example) showed marginal improvements.

A 2007 federally funded evaluation of Social Character Education, the most rigorous external evaluation of commercially available character programs, examined nine schools implementing various programs including CHARACTER COUNTS! using randomized assignment at the school level. After three years, the evaluation found no significant program effects on most student outcomes — including the behavioral outcomes that most matter: reduced aggression, increased prosocial behavior, or improved moral reasoning.

This does not mean CHARACTER COUNTS! is actively harmful or without value. Schools using it may create cleaner common language for discussing behavior and values. The assessments may matter less than what adults do daily in those schools. But parents whose schools use it should know that the program itself has limited evidence of producing the moral development it advertises.

Program/Approach	Methodological Quality of Evidence	Behavioral Outcomes	Moral Internalization Evidence	Notes
CASEL-aligned SEL programs	Strong — multiple RCTs	Consistent improvements	Moderate — some transfer evidence	Strongest overall research base
Berkowitz/Bier high-quality programs	Moderate — varied designs	Positive in most studies	Limited	Specific conditions required
CHARACTER COUNTS!	Limited — few RCTs	Not significant in strongest evaluations	Minimal	Most widely adopted, weakest evidence
Positive Action	Moderate	Positive effects on some measures	Limited	Better-designed than most commercial programs
Service learning	Moderate	Positive for prosocial behavior	Strongest in this category	Requires quality implementation
Adult modeling (home/school)	Strong — developmental research	Consistent	Strongest evidence overall	Not a program but a condition

What Conditions Actually Produce Genuine Character Development

The most consistent finding across the character development research literature is that programs matter far less than conditions. The conditions associated with genuine moral development — the kind that generalizes to novel situations, holds under social pressure, and persists over time — are:

Moral reasoning practice, not moral content delivery. Kohlberg’s foundational research on moral development, replicated and extended across decades, found that what advances moral reasoning is engaging with genuine moral dilemmas — not being told the correct answers. Programs that present students with real ethical tensions and require them to reason through competing values (Why might honesty sometimes harm someone? When does fairness require treating people differently?) produce more moral development than those that present virtue names and correct-answer scenarios.

Adult modeling of the target virtues. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to the gap between what adults say and what adults do. A school that hangs respect posters while adults use sarcasm, public humiliation, and selective enforcement of rules will produce cynicism, not character. Berkowitz and Bier’s research identified school-wide adult modeling as among the strongest predictors of program effectiveness. This is why professional development for teachers and administrators is listed as a component of effective programs — and why programs without this component consistently underperform.

Autonomy-supportive rather than controlling environments. Research by Deci and Ryan on self-determination theory has consistently found that behaviors internalized in autonomy-supportive environments — where children have voice, choice, and understand the reasoning behind expectations — transfer to unmonitored situations. Behaviors produced in controlling environments through reward, punishment, or surveillance do not transfer. This has a direct implication: schools that implement character programs primarily through recognition rewards and consequence charts are likely producing compliance, not character.

Meaningful service learning with reflection. Service learning — structured community service with facilitated reflection on the experience — is among the most consistently effective components of character programs. Yates and Youniss’s research on adolescents engaged in community service found that service with facilitated reflection predicted civic identity and prosocial behavior in adulthood. The reflection component is critical: service without structured meaning-making produces less moral development than service with it.

Family environment above all else. The research on parenting practices and moral development consistently finds larger effects than any school program. Warm, responsive parenting with consistent expectations, explanations of the reasons behind rules, and modeling of prosocial behavior produces stronger moral internalization than any combination of school-based interventions. This finding does not diminish schools’ responsibility — it contextualizes the relative leverage parents and schools have.

For parents interested in positive discipline approaches that align with the moral development research, the connection between how correction is delivered and whether moral reasoning develops is direct and important — the research on inductive discipline (explaining the reasoning and impact of behavior) versus power-assertive discipline (punishment without reasoning) shows consistent effects on children’s moral development.

What Parents Can Do at Home That Research Supports

Use inductive discipline. When addressing misbehavior, explain the moral reasoning and the impact on others — not just the rule and the consequence. “When you didn’t tell the truth, I couldn’t trust what you were saying, and that made it harder for me to help you” is more effective for moral development than “lying is wrong and you’re punished.” This is among the most replicated findings in moral development research.

Present genuine moral dilemmas and reason through them together. Not constructed classroom scenarios but real ones: what should a character in a book do? What would you have done in this situation at school? The practice of moral reasoning — not the delivery of correct answers — is what builds moral capacity.

Acknowledge your own moral imperfection honestly. Children’s moral development is supported when they see adults navigate genuine moral complexity honestly — including saying “I was wrong about that,” “I could have handled that better,” or “this is a hard situation without a clear right answer.” Performative moral certainty is not a model; genuine moral reasoning is.

Create regular opportunities for meaningful contribution. Chores, family responsibilities, neighborhood helping, and community service — not as character education activities but as genuine contributions where the child’s effort actually matters — build the sense of moral agency that programs struggle to produce.

Read and discuss morally complex stories. Literature that places characters in genuine moral difficulty, without tidy resolution, provides the reasoning practice that builds moral development more than stories with virtue-reward endings.

Children who struggle with emotional regulation may find it harder to access moral reasoning in high-stakes situations — when angry, flooded, or in conflict, the prefrontal cortex that supports moral reasoning is the first thing to go offline. Building regulation capacity and moral reasoning capacity simultaneously is more effective than treating them separately.

What to Watch for Over the Next 3 Months

If your child’s school runs a character education program, the most informative thing you can watch for is not the program’s stated outcomes but the gap between program content and adult behavior in the school. A school where adults visibly model the values being taught is implementing what the research actually shows works. A school where values are on posters but not in adult behavior will produce, at best, children who know the vocabulary.

At home, watch for spontaneous moral reasoning — situations where your child considers an impact on someone else, raises a fairness concern unprompted, or wrestles with a genuine moral conflict. These are signs of internalization, not program compliance. They come from reasoning practice, adult modeling, and real moral experience — not from the character trait of the month.

The next significant development in this field is likely to come from the intersection of SEL research and character education, as programs that combine explicit SEL skills with virtue reasoning and service learning are showing stronger outcomes in early evaluations. The National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development has issued frameworks pointing in this direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do character education programs actually reduce bullying?

Some programs show reductions in aggressive behavior in structured settings, but the effects on bullying specifically are inconsistent. Bullying behavior is complex and situationally driven; the bystander behavior and social norms components of character programs may have modest effects. Programs that explicitly address bystander empowerment show the most consistent anti-bullying outcomes, and these overlap more with SEL than traditional character education.

Is SEL the same thing as character education?

They overlap significantly but are not identical. SEL focuses on identifiable psychological competencies (self-awareness, emotional regulation, responsible decision-making) with a psychology research base and measurement framework. Character education emphasizes virtues, moral reasoning, and values with a philosophy and educational tradition base. Many programs blend both. The evidence base for SEL is generally stronger because SEL programs more commonly use randomized evaluation designs.

What if I disagree with the values being taught in my child’s character program?

Character education programs in public schools use secular civic virtues (honesty, respect, fairness, responsibility) that are broadly shared across most cultural and religious traditions. If a program element conflicts with your family’s values in a specific way, most schools will discuss accommodations. The more common concern is not content conflict but emphasis conflict — families who feel the program prioritizes compliance over genuine moral reasoning can supplement at home using the approaches in this article.

At what age should character education begin?

Moral development begins in infancy through attachment and parental modeling long before any formal program. Explicit virtue education can begin in preschool through story and discussion at a developmentally appropriate level. Kohlberg’s research suggests that children under 9 or 10 are primarily in preconventional moral reasoning stages and respond best to concrete, immediate reasoning about consequences and care rather than abstract virtue concepts. Programs calibrated to developmental stage are more effective than those delivering adult moral reasoning frameworks to young children.

How do I evaluate whether my child’s school character program is worth the investment?

Ask these questions: Is the program multiyear or a one-time purchase? Does it include professional development so adults model the program’s values? Are students engaged in genuine moral reasoning, or just correct-answer delivery? Is there a service learning or community contribution component? Has the specific program been independently evaluated with outcome data? Programs that answer yes to most of these questions are far more likely to produce meaningful outcomes than those that cannot.

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About the author

Ricky Flores is the founder of HiWave Makers and an electrical engineer with 15+ years of experience building consumer technology at Apple, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. He writes about how kids learn to build, think, and create in a tech-saturated world. Read more at hiwavemakers.com.

Sources

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8. Josephson Institute of Ethics. (2011). CHARACTER COUNTS! Framework and Implementation Guide. Character Counts National.
9. National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. (2019). From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope. Aspen Institute. https://www.aspeninstitute.org