Measuring moral imagination

Institute pilots assessment tool with Appalachia seminars

December 10, 2025

In October 2014, Elise Murray and her Howard Hall–mate Margaret Waickman co-led an Appalachia seminar in Summers County, West Virginia, through the Institute for Social Concerns. There they and 16 fellow students spent a week immersed in the rhythms of life and work on Bethlehem Farm, a Catholic community that transforms lives through service with the local community. 

And for Elise the week was, indeed, transformative.

“It transformed how I think about contributing to the community, being civically engaged, and working for justice,” she reflects. “My perspective really shifted that week.” 

While details vary from student to student, Elise’s account of her transformative experience could be multiplied thousands of times over from the hundreds of cohorts of students who have participated in the Appalachia seminar since its inception in 1981.

For the 2025 Appalachia seminar, the institute’s justice education staff set out to design a tool that assesses precisely how it transforms students. 

Grounded in Catholic social tradition, the institute’s justice education courses and programming are designed to develop students’ moral imagination, practical wisdom, and courage to act. While students like Elise have reported the ways the Appalachia seminar has transformed or expanded their moral imagination in particular, this raises the question: Can such transformation be measured?

To help answer this question, staff turned to an expert in the field who had herself been transformed through the seminar: Elise (Murray) Dykhuis, Ph.D., assistant professor and character scientist in the Simon Center for the Professional Military Ethic at the United States Military Academy.

Following her experience in the Appalachia seminar in 2014 and graduation from Notre Dame in 2015, Dykhuis pursued a Ph.D. in child study and human development from Tufts University, where her research focused on measuring the development of intellectual humility of cadets at West Point. Now on faculty at West Point, Dykhuis specializes in researching how to measure and assess character development in higher education.

Instead of attempting to directly assess development in moral imagination, which is a broad and potentially unwieldy concept to assess, Dykhuis’s approach breaks moral imagination down into smaller, constitutive parts—or what she calls seed traits. Seed traits are specific isolateable and measurable traits that, at the same time, are “seeds” of broader moral development. 

Utilizing this approach, the institute’s assessment tool isolated three seed traits—curiosity, humility, and flexibility—as indicators of growth in students’ moral imagination over the course of the Appalachia seminar.

Both before and after the seminar, students answered 20 questions rating their ability to practice a particular trait on a five-point scale. 

The results were remarkable. 

In every category in which students were surveyed, there were measurable increases in students’ reported ability to practice the trait. For example, in answer to the prompt “I can compare and contrast my own culture with that of others”—a measure of curiosity—the pre-seminar average of 3.52 increased to a post-seminar average of 4.37, an increase of .85 points out of 5. 

After analyzing the survey results, Dykhuis described the findings as significant.

“I was pleasantly surprised on a statistical front,” Dykhuis said, “because most of the findings were both in the direction we would hope and pretty statistically significant. The differences were big enough that when I saw them, my immediate reaction was, ‘Wow, this is pretty powerful what we’re seeing in such a short amount of time.’”

The quantitative results were borne out by student responses to post-program qualitative questions about their development in each of the three seed traits throughout the course.

Regarding curiosity, Kaitlin Kelly ’28, a biology major who traveled to Hurley Community Development in Buchanan County, Virginia, reported, “Appalachia has taught me that asking questions out of respectful curiosity led to much deeper understanding and relationships. In the past, I would be more cautious of asking any questions at all, but through this course and trip I was able to ask questions that allowed me to form a relationship with some of those in the community and to better understand their lives and how they are impacted by the region.”

Charlie Goodwin ’28, a mechanical engineering major who spent a week at the Appalachian Institute in Wheeling, West Virginia, described how the seminar increased his sense of humility through genuine encounter with others. 

“The Appalachia course strengthened my humility by reminding me how much I can learn from others’ experiences,” Goodwin reflected. “Listening to community members’ stories and my teammates’ reflections helped me see that understanding comes from empathy and openness, not always having the right answer.”

And Torri Loftus ’28, a finance major who served with Big Creek People in Action in McDowell County, West Virginia, shared how the seminar increased her ability to be flexible. 

“I usually go into experiences with a plan and exact schedule to what I want to be doing,” said Loftus. “This trip allowed me to fully be in the moment even when plans did change and things took longer or shorter to accomplish. It allowed me to step back and realize that things that change are not automatically bad, and I can just go with the flow.”

“I was very impressed by what they found,” Dykhuis said. “But, from my own experience in the Appalachia seminar as a student, I was unsurprised by what they were finding because of how it changed things for me.”

The Appalachia seminar is open to undergraduates of any major each fall.

Watch Dykhuis explain how assessments evaluate character growth at the Virtues & Vocations forum.

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