The beliefs, attitudes and practices towards attention to diversity of the different members of the university community can facilitate or hinder educational inclusion (Booth & Ainscow, 2015, Messiou et al., 2016), being the obligation of university teachers to raise awareness among future teachers of early childhood and primary education of this reality and their role in it.

In relation to the prediction and explanation of such beliefs and the behavior of others based on the attribution of mental states to themselves and others, Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the cognitive human ability to do such a thing (Astington, 1993; Wellman, 1990). This skill supports the possibility of guessing the underlying desires, intentions, thoughts and feelings (Dennett, 1978), and it's developing during childhood. Such capacities are found to be related to a variety of social and cognitive factors such as attitudes and moral reasoning.

According to Ajzen (2005) and Fishbein & Ajzen (2010), in their formulation on the theory of reasoned action, people's beliefs and attitudes are the variables that, to a greater extent, predict their behaviors. More than any other psychological construct, attitudes have been at the center of attempts to predict and explain behavior in a wide range of areas, such as organizational behavior, political behavior, and racial discrimination. In fact, as Hammond y Emler (2010) claim, variables such as attitudes to institutional authority, strength of support for moral values and maturity of socio-moral reasoning have all been identified as potential predictors of adolescent delinquency. 

Consistent with Asif et al. (2020), sustainable development is promoted when the system of education provides the learners with an opportunity to equip themselves with moral values, skills, and competences that assist them in effecting personal and community positive changes. For this purpose, teachers play an important role as moral agents, and students consider the teacher a role model.

Two decades ago, Nuévalos-Ruiz (2003) tested, also in university students, the discussion of moral dilemmas as a strategy to provide moral cognitive experiences that facilitate the natural progression of moral judgment through the exposition of a peer modeling. Besides, recent studies (i.e. Daou et al., 2022), come to demonstrate that group learning based on debates are effective strategies in the acquisition of skills related to personal, social, learning to learn, citizenship, awareness and cultural expressions, essential to influence the beliefs and attitudes of our future teachers.

Our aim is related to the learning of strategies focused on developing moral reasoning. In relation to this aim, Han, Dawson et al. (2020) found that when the judgments were made based on the preferred moral schema, the reaction time for moral judgments was significantly moderated by the moral developmental status. In addition, as a participant becomes more confident with moral judgment, he or she differentiates the preferred versus other schemas better particularly when the participant’s abilities for moral judgment are more developed.

According to the theoretical framework, we are improving a method to build up moral competence and, at the same time, we inteed to provide future teachers a strategy to do so in early childhood and primary education. A convenience sample of 58 Education students (22 men and 36 women) aged 17-22 (M=18.43, SD=1.11) participated in a pre-post design. After a pretest that included the Moral Competence Test, 10 sessions -one per week- based on the Konstanz method of Moral Dilemmas (KMDD) were carried out in which the content of the module was treated through dilemmas on which the class had to adopt a position and debate. Finally, twelve weeks later, a posttest was carried out.

Previous to the means comparison we checked the normality of the sample through a Shapiro-Wilk test which affirmatively confirmed than p was not significant (p= 0,212). Student´s t-test for paired samples specifies that pretest for the Moral Competence Test (mean=24,134; sd= 10,547) is less than postest (mean= 29,155; sd= 13,074) with a significant difference in the C-Score (p < 0,001) and a medium size effect (d= -0,443). On the other hand, the levels of moral competence correlated positively with other variables such as: empathy r= 0,126 (p< ,001); Openess r= 0,299 (p<,001). Besides, right-wing authoritarianism showed a significant negative correlation, r=-,079 (p= ,04). According to these results we can conclude that our strategy was effective and it is possible to increase the moral competence in our students. It will be also interesting to explore the relations with other variables related to attitudes.

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