IMPROVING THE METHODOLOGY OF MORAL AND ETHICAL EDUCATION OF STUDENTS IN INFORMATICS LESSONS

Abstract

Informatics lessons are where school students first meet questions of privacy, authorship, online conduct and the fairness of automated systems, yet these questions are usually treated as technical rules rather than as moral learning. This paper proposes a methodology for integrating moral and ethical education into informatics lessons. The study follows an integrative literature review design combined with document analysis and conceptual modelling. The corpus comprised foundational works on moral development and character education, computer and information ethics, international frameworks on digital competence and digital citizenship, the ACM Code of Ethics and the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, as well as the normative documents of the Republic of Uzbekistan on education and continuous spiritual education. Sources were coded deductively against Rest's four-component model of moral functioning. The analysis produced three results: (1) a map linking eight informatics content areas to the ethical issues and values they raise; (2) a five-component methodological model (target, content, methods, organisational conditions, assessment) built on six principles; and (3) a set of observable criteria and indicators for assessing students' ethical awareness, judgement, motivation and action in digital environments. The paper argues that moral education in informatics is most effective when it is embedded in regular subject tasks rather than delivered as separate talks, and when it is assessed through students' decisions in realistic cases. The model is conceptual; its effectiveness should be tested in a pedagogical experiment.