A dialogue system for identifying need deficiencies in moral education

Abstract

Moral education refers to the cultivation of ideals, moral quality, culture, and discipline. One of its main tasks is to analyze students’ problem behaviors and identify their underlying need deficiencies. Previous psychological research has focused on studying how distinct factors affect psychological needs and problem behaviors. However, these findings have provided only scattered guidelines for identifying students’ need deficiencies, which are difficult for inexperienced teachers and parents to apply systematically. To address these issues, we attempt to answer two key research questions in this work. First, how do we define a theoretical framework so that the psychological research findings can be systematically applied to identify students’ need deficiencies? Second, can the latest AI technologies be employed to identify such need deficiencies automatically? To answer these research questions, we first build a theoretical framework to summarize all the factors relevant to the students’ problem behaviors and need deficiencies. After that, we propose and develop a task-oriented dialogue system that can properly inquire about different aspects of students’ information and automatically infer their need deficiencies. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the system’s performance with real-life cases. The results show that the built dialogue system could effectively serve as a diagnostic tool to identify the students’ need deficiencies.

Students’ and teachers’ voice on the outcomes of a citizenship education curriculum

“…During the past decade, attention has been turned to citizenship education in schools as the response to diverse social issues of democracy (Joris and Agordag, 2019). In particular, UNESCO highlights global citizenship education (GCE) as a strategic area and uses it as a response to human right violations, inequality, poverty, threatened peace, and sustainability (Chen et al, 2021). It aims to help learners understand that these are global, not local issues and to become active promoters of more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure, and sustainable societies (UNESCO, 2019).…”

“…Moral education concerns the development of shared values, such as empathy (Hofmann, 2019), altruism (Eisenberg and Mussen, 1989), as well as their development. Character education, on the other hand, aims to improve student behaviour by reducing in-school violence, disorder or other disciplinary problems (Chen et al, 2021; Meindl et al, 2018). Therefore, it involves the development of ‘one's own identity, which is, by definition, a value-loaded endeavor’ (Geboers et al, 2013: 160).…”

The Roles of Principals in Teacher Competency Development for Students’ Morale Improvement

“…Today schools can help students build morals by using values-based education programs that refer to ideas and ideologies to improve and develop the students' character toward independent individual development (Baumann, 2018;Gao & Wang, 2020;Meindl et al, 2018). Chen et al (2021) said that moral education must not only refer to the cultivation of ideals, moral qualities, culture, and discipline, but it must also be able to identify shortcomings and psychological and behavioral needs of students by emphasizing an effective dialogue system. Moral education with an emphasis on dialogue has been adopted by the UK, especially in preventing the practice of intolerance and radicalization among students and staff in schools (Winter et al, 2022).…”

Moral sensitivity of nursing students. Adaptation and validation of the moral sensitivity questionnaire in Spain

“…Nowadays, bioethics is a compulsory subject in health care curricula [ 3 ]. In the case of the nursing profession, many articles highlight the importance of training nursing students in ethical aspects by carrying out studies to measure: the student’s degree of sensitivity [ 4 – 7 ]; and the acquisition of ethical skills [ 8 , 9 ]—part where concepts such as ethical sensitivity and moral sensitivity are introduced.…”