Kohlberg

At which of Kohlberg's levels of moral development are the students in your class functioning? Cite specific evidence and explain your reasoning for selecting these levels. What did the teacher do, or what might be done, to help the students advance to higher levels with regard to the examples you supplied above? Be sure to include a reference in your response. 

I'm having a really hard time determining which moral development stage the 7th grade students I've been observing are probably at. I think a lot of it is circumstantial, and could be argued to fit into more than one stage. They don't cheat, but I don't know what they are thinking, so I don't know why they don't cheat. But, I would argue that in this instance, lots of them are in Stage 1 of Pre-Conventional Morality because they are scared of being punished if they were to be caught cheating. I bet a lot more of them would cheat if they knew they wouldn't get caught. (I sometimes think that when I'm stumped on a test question.) But, some of them are probably in Stage 4 in Conventional Morality too, since they wouldn't cheat even if they knew they wouldn't get caught because they would feel guilty. This article kind of mirrors my reasoning, in that multiple stages could be possible for cheating, just depending on how you want to argue it: https://siobhancurious.com/2007/08/21/cheating-and-moral-development-part-3/.
As a whole though, I think most of the students generally follow the rules because they don't want to be seen as a "bad kid". This would put them in the Conventional Morality, Stage 3 group. They behave because their friends are behaving, their peers are behaving, their parents want them to behave, etc. They aren't necessarily behaving because they really want to.