There is a dearth of studies exploring how younger children engage in civic life, what may be expected of them given their age, and what instruments may be used to capture their levels of civic engagement. Addressing these questions, this article presents key findings from a pilot study that aimed to create a validated instrument designed to measure the civic engagement of primary school children. Based on a survey administered to 655 primary school children aged 9–11 across England, this article focuses on the new measure that was specifically designed, and then tested and validated through both exploratory and confirmatory analyses. The findings validate a tripartite measure of civic engagement that assesses the civic attitudes, actions and awareness of 9–11-year-olds. This measure was found to be both practical and efficient in its administration, and it has been shown to be easily comprehensible by this age group. This new measure addresses an important gap in the literature on civic engagement in children, providing researchers with a validated tool to effectively measure civic engagement in 9–11-year-olds. The findings have implications for both researchers and educators interested in designing and evaluating interventions aimed at promoting civic engagement among younger children.

Character Education Empirical Research (CEER) is a rapidly emerging field, but no thematic overview is available. This study aimed to fill this gap in the research, generating a thematic map of the CEER, then comparing it to empirical research from the fields of Moral Education (ME) and Positive Education (PE). PRISMA guidelines were followed to conduct a systematic search of the Web of Science and Scopus databases. 222 CEER articles were identified and thematically analysed. Six themes were identified: Conceptualisations, Measure Validations, Associations, Impact, Implementation and Development. Another systematic search was undertaken for PE and ME articles, and the results randomly sampled to attain 100 empirical articles from each field. These samples, along with the CEER, were subjected to a content analysis using the six CEER themes. Results revealed most MEER, PEER and CEER fit into the CEER thematic map, but that there are some key differences in research distribution.

Character education has become an established field within education research. However, no overview of this rapidly evolving field is available, and several previous methodological concerns about the field, including the use of valid measures and of robust quantitative research protocols, remain unaddressed. The purpose of this review is to fill this gap in the literature, addressing the following research questions: RQ1: What is the current publishing landscape of character education research? and RQ2: Is the quality of character education quantitative research a cause for concern? We searched the Scopus and Web of Science databases, and, following abstract screening, generated a pool of 981 articles for analysis. Of these articles, 38% were published in a journal without a Web of Science journal impact factor, and only 10% conducted intervention studies. Regarding quantitative character education research, 72% of quantitative studies did not use a valid measure, and, for intervention studies, only 8% used an active control, 61% did not randomise, and 75% did not report a standard error, effect size, or both. Our recommendations include a greater depth of empirical character education research in most contexts, the development of more character-related measures, and the increased use of active controls and randomisation.

Drawing upon cross-sectional research with pre- and in-service police officers in the U.K. (N = 571), this paper reports on the moral reasoning strategies favored by the respondents in dealing with bespoke work-related moral quandaries specific to the professional practice of policing. The dominant form of moral reasoning in dealing with those dilemmas was deontological (rule-based). The second most frequently selected reasoning strategy was virtue ethical. Further analysis of the police research data indicated that those with an undergraduate degree were significantly more likely to adopt virtue ethical and consequentialist-utilitarian reasoning strategies than those who did not have an undergraduate degree.