The raw pooled result looks spectacular on paper. Using a random-effects model fitted with restricted maximum likelihood estimation, the authors calculated a standardized mean difference of Hedges g equal to 1.29, with a 95 percent confidence interval stretching from 0.73 to 1.85. In the conventional language of meta-analysis, anything above 0.8 is considered a large effect, and a value of 1.29 would suggest that moral education interventions produce gains in value acquisition and moral development that are larger than roughly ninety percent of untreated children would show. If that number were taken at face value, it would rank preschool values education among the most powerful educational interventions ever measured, rivaling or exceeding the effects reported in landmark meta-analyses of school-based social and emotional learning programs.

But the authors were careful to interrogate that number rather than celebrate it, and what they found should change how educators and policymakers read the evidence. The heterogeneity statistic, I-squared, came in at a staggering 94.8 percent, meaning that nearly all of the variability among the pooled effect sizes reflects real differences between studies rather than sampling noise. Even more telling is the prediction interval, which spans from minus 1.22 to 3.79. That enormous range means that in a future study of the same kind of intervention, the true effect could plausibly be strongly negative, null, or extraordinarily positive. When a prediction interval is that wide, the authors argue, the pooled mean does not represent a single expected effect that a practitioner could reasonably anticipate. It is a statistical average of fundamentally different quantities, not a forecast.

The search for what was driving that heterogeneity led the researchers to a striking pattern involving study design and risk of bias. When the analysis was restricted to studies judged to be at low risk or only some concerns of bias, using the Cochrane RoB 2 tool for randomized trials and ROBINS-I for non-randomized studies, the pooled effect fell to 0.79. When a single influential study, Betawi’s 2023 experiment on moral stories and integrity values, was reclassified as high risk, the estimate dropped further to 0.53. In other words, the more rigorous the evidence, the more modest the benefit, a classic signature of bias inflating apparent effectiveness. Design family alone explained 85 percent of the between-study variance in the meta-regression, an unusually high proportion that points to methodological artifacts rather than genuine differences in children or curricula.

The design split is particularly revealing. Five of the six studies testing full curricular programs, the kind of multi-week values education packages often embedded in national preschool frameworks, were rated at high risk of bias, and these were the studies producing the largest effects. By contrast, all ten of the brief moral-story experiments, in which children hear a short narrative and are then assessed on behaviors such as honesty, sharing, or helping, were rated at low risk of bias, and these produced moderate effects. The pattern is intuitively understandable: a brief story experiment with blinded outcome assessment is far easier to conduct cleanly than a semester-long curriculum delivered by teachers who know which children received it and measured with instruments completed by those same teachers or by parents aware of the program. But it means the two literatures are not really measuring the same thing, and pooling them obscures more than it reveals.

The moral-story experiments themselves form a fascinating and methodologically healthy body of work. Building on the influential finding by Lee and colleagues in Psychological Science that classic honesty stories differentially affect children’s lie-telling depending on whether the story ends with positive or negative consequences, researchers have tested narratives emphasizing protagonists’ negative emotions about misdeeds, stories promoting confession and helping behavior, and even augmented reality-enriched tales designed to encourage altruistic sharing. Recent work has refined the recipe further: studies from Chinese laboratories have confirmed that moral stories can promote honesty in young children, while other experiments have found that emotional elements such as a protagonist’s guilt over lying promote honesty in early elementary school children but not in preschoolers, suggesting developmental boundaries on when these narrative interventions take hold. Questions about whether anthropomorphized animal characters are as effective as human protagonists have also been tested, with mixed results.

The curricular studies, for their part, are not without promise, but their designs leave too much room for alternative explanations. Programs built around picture books, creative drama, music, role play, and structured activity sequences have been implemented in preschool settings from Türkiye to Jordan to Taiwan, often aligned with national early childhood frameworks. Outcomes have been measured with instruments such as the Preschool Social Values Acquisition Scale and teacher and parent report forms. Yet when raters applied modern bias assessment tools, the recurring problems were predictable: unblinded outcome assessors, attrition that was not accounted for, and selection of participants in ways that could favor the intervention group. These are exactly the design flaws that decades of research in education and clinical psychology have shown to systematically exaggerate treatment effects.

The authors also examined publication bias using funnel plot asymmetry tests, trim-and-fill analysis, and failsafe N calculations, the standard toolkit for detecting whether small or null studies have gone missing from the published record. Their broader conclusion, however, rests less on those diagnostics than on the risk-of-bias sensitivity analyses and the prediction interval, both of which counsel against treating the pooled estimate as a practical guide. The authors explicitly state that the pooled figure should not be interpreted as a single expected intervention effect, and they call for registered preschool trials with blinded assessment as the necessary next step. That recommendation echoes a long-standing theme in the moral education literature, going back to meta-analyses of moral judgment interventions in older students and comprehensive syntheses of character education programs, which have repeatedly found that enthusiasm for values education has outpaced the rigor of its evidence base.

Why does this matter beyond the seminar room? Values, character, and moral education occupy a prominent place in early childhood policy around the world, from statutory early years frameworks in the United Kingdom to national preschool curricula in Türkiye, and governments invest real resources in programs premised on the assumption that moral learning can be deliberately accelerated in the preschool years. Developmental science offers genuine grounds for that optimism: infants show social evaluation preferences before their first birthday, toddlers help spontaneously, and children across diverse societies navigate fairness and prosociality from early ages. But the new analysis suggests that the leap from that developmental foundation to specific, curriculum-driven gains has been documented far more convincingly in tightly controlled story experiments than in the classroom programs that actually reach most children. The honest reading of the evidence is that brief, well-designed narrative interventions can modestly shift specific moral behaviors in the short term, while the case for comprehensive values curricula remains, for now, built on studies too weak to bear the weight placed upon them.

The study’s authors have deposited their analytic dataset on the Open Science Framework, allowing other researchers to scrutinize and extend the work, and they report no funding or competing interests. Their transparency extends to a detailed account of generative AI use in drafting analysis code, with the authors verifying all outputs and retaining responsibility for the analysis. What they have produced is less a celebration of moral education than a methodological warning shot: in a field where the outcomes are measured by the same teachers and parents who deliver the interventions, effect sizes will inflate unless researchers build in blinding, preregistration, and independent assessment. Until such trials are conducted, parents and educators can take modest comfort in the moral-story findings, while treating grand claims about values curricula with the statistical caution this meta-analysis so carefully demonstrates.

Subject of Research: Effects of values, character, and moral education interventions on preschool children's moral development

Article Title: The effects of values, character, and moral education interventions on preschool children’s value acquisition and moral development outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Article References: Boz, M. E., & Şen, F. N. (2026). The effects of values, character, and moral education interventions on preschool children’s value acquisition and moral development outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 442. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01742-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01742-9

Keywords: moral education, values education, character education, preschool children, meta-analysis, systematic review, moral stories, risk of bias, early childhood education, prosocial behavior, honesty, effect size

The module, known as the Akhlak Nabawiyyah (ANa) Teaching Module, takes its name from the Arabic term for Prophetic character. It is built around five cardinal virtues drawn from the Sirah Nabawiyyah, the recorded life and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad: patience (ṣabr), diligence (ijtihād), compassion (raḥmah), honesty (ṣidq), and trustworthiness (amānah). Rather than treating these as abstract theological concepts, the module translates them into age-appropriate pedagogical activities—stories, songs, role-play, and structured daily routines—that align with how preschool children actually acquire moral understanding.

Moral education in early childhood is not a new idea, but the scientific consensus on its importance has hardened considerably in recent decades. Longitudinal research in developmental psychology has repeatedly shown that the years before formal schooling are a critical window for shaping emotional regulation, prosocial behaviour, and the rudimentary sense of fairness that underpins later civic values. Character education scholars such as Thomas Lickona and the research-driven frameworks advanced by Marvin Berkowitz and colleagues have argued that effective moral education requires deliberate, structured intervention rather than incidental modelling alone. The ANa module was designed with precisely this logic: to convert the moral content of Islamic tradition into a systematic, teachable, and assessable curriculum component.

The research team, led by Nur Adillah Ramly of Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, together with Abdul Halim Masnan, Syaubari Othman, and Siti Nordarma Ab Rahman of University Sains Malaysia, faced a familiar problem in curriculum design research: how do you demonstrate that a new teaching module is actually fit for purpose before it is deployed at scale? Their answer was a two-part methodological architecture that borrows from programme evaluation theory and consensus-based expert validation.

The first pillar is the Context, Input, Process, Product (CIPP) model, an evaluation framework developed by Daniel Stufflebeam that has become a mainstay of educational programme assessment. CIPP forces designers to interrogate a curriculum from four angles. The Context dimension asks whether the module addresses a genuine need in its intended setting—in this case, Malaysian Islamic preschools operating under the national KSPK preschool curriculum standard. The Input dimension examines whether the resources, content, and materials are adequate and appropriate. The Process dimension evaluates whether the proposed teaching activities are feasible and coherent in real classroom conditions. Finally, the Product dimension considers whether the intended outcomes—the internalisation of the five target virtues—are realistically achievable through the module as designed.

The second pillar is the Modified Nominal Group Technique (NGT), a structured consensus method originally developed by Delbecq, Van de Ven, and Gustafson in the 1970s for programme planning. NGT is prized in educational and medical research because it balances the benefits of group deliberation against the pathologies of group dynamics. In its modified form used here, a panel of experts works partly in silence and partly in structured discussion, generating, ranking, and scoring evaluation items without allowing a single dominant voice to steer the outcome. This is a meaningful departure from conventional expert review, where a panel of evaluators discussing a curriculum face-to-face can fall prey to anchoring effects, hierarchy effects, and social pressure toward premature agreement.

For this study, the researchers assembled a panel of eight experienced Islamic preschool teachers, each with established credentials in early childhood education. The choice of practitioners rather than purely academic experts was deliberate: the question at hand was not whether the module was theoretically elegant but whether it could survive contact with real classrooms. The teachers evaluated the ANa module against the CIPP dimensions, rating items related to content relevance, structural organisation, cultural appropriateness, and practical applicability.

The results were striking in their consistency. The panel achieved expert agreement of at least 80 percent—a threshold widely treated as evidence of substantive consensus in NGT studies—across all major evaluation domains. The teachers endorsed the relevance of the module’s content to the moral development needs of preschoolers, its structural coherence as a teaching resource, its cultural suitability for the Malaysian Islamic preschool context, and, critically, its feasibility for everyday classroom implementation. In curriculum validation research, where expert panels frequently fragment over pedagogical philosophy or workload concerns, this level of agreement across all four CIPP dimensions suggests the module strikes a rare balance between doctrinal fidelity and practical teachability.

The methodological rigour matters because Islamic character education modules have often been developed and disseminated with limited formal validation. Previous Malaysian studies have noted both the promise of Islamic character education interventions and persistent gaps between module design and classroom implementation. By subjecting the ANa module to a structured consensus procedure anchored in an established evaluation model, the research team has produced something comparatively rare in the field: an evidence-based values education package whose claim to validity rests on documented expert judgment rather than assertion.

There is also a broader policy frame. The authors explicitly align the module with Sustainable Development Goal 4.7, the UNESCO education target that calls on education systems to ensure learners acquire knowledge and skills for sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity. At first glance, connecting a Prophetic tradition-based character module to a global citizenship agenda might seem like a stretch. But the underlying logic is coherent: values education that anchors children in a positive cultural and moral identity is increasingly understood as a foundation for the kind of engaged, tolerant citizenship that SDG 4.7 envisions. Children who internalise patience, compassion, honesty, and trustworthiness within their own cultural framework are, in principle, better positioned to engage respectfully with those outside it.

The developmental rationale for starting at preschool age is similarly grounded. Social learning theory, articulated by Albert Bandura, holds that children acquire behaviour patterns largely through observation and imitation of valued models. Preschool classrooms are among the most concentrated environments of adult modelling a young child will ever encounter, which makes them a uniquely efficient venue for virtue-based instruction. The ANa module’s designers leveraged this by embedding the five virtues in repeated, embodied routines rather than one-off lessons—consistency that behaviourists and character educators alike identify as essential for habituation at this age.

For educators and policymakers, the study’s practical significance lies in its portability. The validation framework itself—CIPP dimensions operationalised through a Modified NGT with practitioner panels—can be applied to other values-based curricula, whether religious or secular, in other national contexts. And the module offers Islamic schools, which educate tens of millions of children worldwide, a template for moving from well-intentioned moral instruction to systematically validated pedagogy. The authors position the work as a model that can be adopted and adapted by educators and authorities seeking to deepen values-based learning in early education settings.

Limitations remain, as they do in any validation study. Expert consensus, however rigorous, is not the same as demonstrated impact on children. The panel confirmed that the module is relevant, well-structured, culturally apt, and usable—but the next scientific step is controlled implementation research measuring whether preschoolers taught with the ANa module actually show measurable gains in patience, honesty, compassion, diligence, and trustworthiness compared with peers in conventional programmes. Such outcome studies would close the loop between design validity and educational effectiveness.

Still, the study arrives at a moment when governments and educators worldwide are reconsidering the place of character formation in early schooling, amid concerns about children’s emotional wellbeing and social cohesion in digital-era childhoods. By demonstrating that a faith-rooted moral curriculum can be validated with the same methodological tools used for mainstream educational interventions, the Malaysian team has made a contribution that reaches past Islamic education alone. It signals that the science of moral education—its models, its consensus methods, and its evaluation frameworks—matures precisely when it learns to speak to the full diversity of the classrooms it serves. For the youngest learners, whose moral worlds are being built one story and one routine at a time, that maturation cannot come soon enough.