What Works in Character Education

The phrase “What Works in Character Education” has a hallowed place in the history of the science of character education. The first report using the phrase appeared in 2005, summarizing the first large-scale effort to evaluate the efficacy of character education programs. Its primacy afforded it an outsized role in subsequent work. It suggested guidelines for defining the boundaries of character education research; and identified a set of features that were common among effective programs, providing the basis for the PRIMED model discussed elsewhere in this text. After a description of that original project, we summarize systematic reviews and meta-analyses inspired by What Works, though we note that the focus…