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The purpose of this study is to explore how teachers across content areas conceptualize planning and teaching of the Holocaust. Although there are numerous studies on Holocaust education, particularly on teachers’ approaches and practices, there is little research regarding teachers’ use of secondary sources and the impact these sources have on their approaches to planning and teaching about the Holocaust. This study will examine New Jersey state standards and curricula, as well as educational practitioner journals, in order to highlight relationships between resources provided to teachers and their approaches to planning and teaching about the Holocaust. Further, it will provide researchers with an empirical analysis, contributing to the increasing scholarly literature on Holocaust education. This study addresses the following research questions: How do teachers and policy makers in Language Arts and Social Studies conceptualize teaching of the Holocaust? What approaches do Language Arts and Social Studies teachers use when planning for teaching about the Holocaust? In what ways do state standards and mandated curricula guide teachers’ decision-making when teaching about the Holocaust? What recommendations do content area specific practitioner journals make for teaching about the Holocaust? This intrinsic collective case study will triangulate data from multiple sectors of the educational system to provide a broad and detailed view of the approaches to teaching about the Holocaust across different content areas. This study will additionally serve as a tool for school districts and policy makers to inform their future decisions regarding the selection and use of secondary sources and curriculum content, allowing teachers to make better pedagogical decisions with regards to their students’ learning. / Educational Leadership

While empathy is widely understood as a multifaceted construct and an important component of prosocial behavior, its role is less certain with regard to aggressive and bullying behavior in schools. In an effort to further the bully-prevention-and-intervention initiative, the validity of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI)--a self-report assessment that aims to evaluate both cognitive and affective components of empathy--was examined to determine its potential effectiveness as a screener to inform intervention for school-age youth. It is hypothesized that the IRI may insufficiently assess students' true empathic capacity due to the social desirability bias inherent in self-report scales, particularly with a youth population. The present study uses a correlational design to separately examine the strengths of the relationships between individuals' self-reports of cognitive and affective empathy on the IRI and respective criterion measures, social cognitive processing tasks and physiological responses to emotion-eliciting stimuli. Reliability analyses were also conducted to determine whether the IRI measures cognitive and affective empathy as separate constructs with a school-age population. It was hypothesized that individuals' self-reports of cognitive empathy would be strongly, positively related to performance on social cognitive processing tasks, and that students' self-report of affective empathy would yield weaker correlations with physiological responses to emotion-eliciting stimuli due to the social desirability bias inherent to the scale. Children in grades three though eight (n= 37) participated in the current study. Youth were recruited from an afterschool program and a summer camp from a parochial elementary school in a city in Pennsylvania. Students were asked to complete the IRI self-report scale. Two social cognitive processing tasks from the NEPSY-II were administered as a criterion measure for self-report of cognitive empathy. Change in fingertip temperature was measured during the viewing of two video vignettes to observe physiological response to emotion-eliciting stimuli as a criterion measure for affective empathy. While some strong, positive correlations were observed between male students' responses within the cognitive and affective empathy subscales of the IRI and performance on criterion measures, no positive correlations were observed between female students' self-reports of empathy and performance on criterion measures. Reliability analyses yielded no sufficient distinction between self-reports of affective and cognitive empathy. / School Psychology

Psychopaths have traditionally been excluded from the moral realm and have regularly been used as a paradigm case for explaining why emotions, or emotional knowledge, is necessary for the acquisition of moral knowledge. Psychopaths possess an affective deficit that results in an almost total lack of empathy. Emotionists argue that emotions (specifically empathy) are central to moral understanding, and that, since the psychopaths possess this affective deficit, they lack the capacity to acquire moral knowledge which is necessary to be morally responsible. Given recent neurological findings regarding psychopaths, I ague that Emotionists cannot use the psychopath as a case example supporting their argument that emotions are necessary for moral knowledge. I argue that despite psychopaths’ affective disorder, they possess three of the capacities (via cognitive mechanisms) considered by many to be necessary for moral responsibility. Those three capacities are the capacity to acquire moral knowledge, the capacity to be reason-responsive to moral demands, and the capacity to control one’s actions in light of moral demands and reasons. The upshot of my analysis is a rethinking of what it means to possess the right kind of emotional knowledge and a rethinking of the capabilities of psychopaths in relation to the moral realm. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The commonly held view in philosophy is that psychopaths are not morally responsible. Psychopaths amount to about 1% of the current population and up to 25% of male criminal offenders. While these numbers seem rather small in comparison to the total population, philosophers, psychologists and behavioural psychologists regularly point to psychopaths for insight into the moral realm. The main aim of this dissertation is to block the Emotionist argument that emotions are necessary for moral knowledge and argue that psychopaths, despite their affective disorder, possess three of the capacities considered by many to be necessary for moral responsibility. The three capacities are the capacity to acquire moral knowledge, the capacity to be reason-responsive to moral demands, and the capacity to control one’s actions in light of moral demands and reasons. I conclude by arguing that psychopaths are capable of moral responsibility from a cognitive standpoint and that the Emotionist argument must seek another route to establish its conclusion that emotions are necessary for moral knowledge.