The Association between Ethic Education and Moral Reasoning in Indonesian Higher Education: A Meta-Analysis

Integrating ethics education into higher education is essential for fostering students’ ethical awareness, strengthening their critical thinking, and guiding them toward responsible decision-making. Despite its importance, the incorporation of formal ethics education into Indonesian university curricula remains limited, creating a challenge in meeting societal expectations that graduates embody integrity and moral responsibility. The high occurrence of academic dishonesty among graduates emphasizes the need for thorough ethical instruction. This meta-analysis, to our knowledge the first to synthesize research on ethics education in Indonesian higher education, examines ten primary studies assessing its impact on students’ moral reasoning. The findings reveal a relatively small overall effect size (r = 0.151), indicating that ethics education exerts a modest influence. Variability across studies suggests that gender may play a role: female students appear to demonstrate slightly lower levels of moral reasoning than male students. This result is noteworthy, as it contrasts with prevailing assumptions in the literature that often attribute stronger ethical orientations to female students. Future research should address methodological gaps and extend investigations to a wider range of educational contexts. Such efforts are necessary to design ethics education programs that more effectively nurture moral development across diverse student populations.