The ECI Research Team often gets questions like the above from educators leading character-related projects. Typically, our answer is something like: “Let’s get together sometime to discuss your project, how far along it is, and what you hope it will accomplish.” This is because, before discussing assessment tools, we first need to answer a deeper question: What kind(s) of evidence could tell us whether the institution or program is having the intended effect on students?
The answer to this deeper question depends not only on the specifics of a particular project, but also on where that project is in the “program lifecycle.” Many teams eagerly jump straight into thinking about how they can assess their students’ character — looking for information directly about the extent to which their students possess the traits or qualities that they hope to cultivate. However, for those still in a program planning, development, or improvement phase, it may be more useful to gather information about students’ experiences and perceptions or even the institutional climate or culture.
We recommend doing some serious reflection on your program — what you hope it will achieve, how it will do so, and how far along it is in its development — before pursuing any particular assessment option. This article is intended as a resource for those engaged in such reflection, offering an overview of options and links to examples and helpful resources.
Assessing students’ perceptions and experiences
For character educators with relatively new programs, the most useful assessment strategy might be one that provides information about students’ experiences and how they feel about the program. Students’ perceptions of the impact of the program may well be mistaken, but they are a good place to start.
At this early stage, qualitative methods (e.g., interviews or focus groups) can be especially helpful. Such methods provide rich detail and nuance that can sometimes be missed in quantitative data, and allow students to raise ideas or questions that we, as educators, wouldn’t have considered. Some ECI grantees have partnered with organizations like Project Zero that specialize in interview-based research with students and alumni.
It may also be possible to use quantitative data that have already been collected by your institution. For example, many colleges and universities regularly participate in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Although the NSSE does not focus on character by that name, their survey includes questions about the degree to which students think that their college experiences helped them to understand themselves, work effectively with others, contribute to their communities, think critically and analytically, and so on. And some, including Paul Umbach and George Kuh (one of the people originally responsible for creating NSSE) have sought to use NSSE data to examine students’ character development. To access existing data of this kind, the place to start is by contacting your institutional research office.
Assessing institutions and cultures
In other instances, character educators might want to assess their institutions or the culture found therein. For example, they may want to know whether and in what ways students, staff, or faculty think the institution contributes to character growth. This kind of information may be particularly relevant to those working to change how the entire campus community thinks about character or about the importance of its development. As above, qualitative methods can be quite useful here.
There are also numerous efforts currently underway to collect quantitative data on cultures of character. For example, ECI grantees at Davidson College are currently working to re-popularize the Personal and Social Responsibility Inventory. This is a campus climate measure developed by researchers at Columbia University and the University of Michigan in 2006, with support from the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the John Templeton Foundation. The inventory comes in both student and staff/faculty variants and quantifies the degree to which these groups think that their institutions help students strive for excellence, maintain integrity, contribute to larger communities, take others’ perspectives seriously, and develop their moral reasoning abilities.
Other ECI grantees at Seattle Pacific University and Baylor University have been developing another measure intended to assess “the extent to which character, virtue, and moral growth are fostered across a campus community.”
A number of ECI grantees are also participating in the data collection through the Academic Flourishing Initiative hosted by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, part of which examines the extent to which students perceive their university contributing to their character development and capacity for citizenship, along with broader aspects of flourishing.
Again, it may be possible to take advantage of existing data. For example, the Higher Education Research Institute has been surveying college and university faculty for decades about their goals for their undergraduate students. One of the questions on this survey is about the degree to which faculty think that it is part of their role to “develop students’ moral character.” By accessing these data, you might examine rates of endorsement at your institution, compare with other, comparable institutions, compare across academic disciplines within your institution, and so on.
Assessing students’ character or processes leading to their growth
Finally, when the time is ripe, character educators will naturally want data about the extent to which their students have, or are developing, good character. One-off assessments of students’ character can give educators a point-in-time “snapshot” of where students are currently at, and repeated assessments can provide insight into how students are changing over time.
There is a wide range of available measures. (By our count, ECI grantees currently use over 50 different measures.) Many projects focus on particular character traits and, as such, use trait-specific measures—like the Epistemic Curiosity Scale, Empathy Quotient, or Situated Wise Reasoning Scale. Others adopt a more holistic approach. For example, some are seeking to measure virtuous motivations across a range of contexts. And other ECI project teams at Harvard University and Fairleigh Dickinson University have been developing a measure, called the Inventory of Common Character Items. This inventory is composed of questions pulled from established surveys, and the creators hope it will be useful across a range of settings.
Because true character growth may take a very long time, some educators are interested in assessing the more short-term processes that lead to longer-term growth. For example, teams at West Point and Wheaton are developing measures, and will soon be collecting longitudinal data, to test their 3M’s model (“mindset”, “motivation”, and “means”) of lifelong character development.
In some cases, character educators may want to partner with organizations or networks that can handle the data collection logistics. For example, the Center for Expanding Leadership and Opportunity runs an ongoing research project called the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL). As its name suggests, the original intention behind the MSL was to study leadership. But the surveys include a variety of measures that might be used as indicators of students’ character. One of the core measures is the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale. This multi-dimensional measure aims to assess the degree to which students are motivated and committed to making the world a better place, understand their own values and behave consistently with them, seek to contribute to their communities, handle disagreements with civility, and work collaboratively towards common goals with others. The MSL surveys also include self-report measures of traits like curiosity, hope, and resilience. In 2025, ECI sponsored five grantee institutions to participate in the MSL, but several others were already, independently participating in the program.
What now?
There are numerous questions, crucial for an effective assessment plan, that we have not discussed here. For example, we have not touched on the questions of how to define “character,” how to evaluate measures, and so on. We also have barely skimmed the surface of questions about logistics, such as the costs (in terms of time, money, and student effort) of different assessment options, institutional feasibility, or other pragmatic considerations. These are all important, difficult questions—and we, at ECI, are wrestling with them ourselves. Nonetheless, we hope that this article serves as an introduction to the landscape of character assessment and the diverse range of projects found in the ECI community.
Dr. Emily Hunt-Hinojosa is Associate Director of Partnerships and Senior Research and Assessment Scholar for the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.
Dr. Michael Prinzing is the Research and Assessment Scholar with the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.