Character Building at Bachelor’s Psychology Program - Findings Based on a Natural Approach

Character building (CB) is important for basic psychologists. This study aims to investigate the implementation and interpretation of character building (CB) in the three-year Bachelor of Psychology program at Tilburg University. Five dimensions of CB, including intellectual independence, critical mindset, social responsibility, scientiﬁc responsibility, and entrepreneurship, were analyzed using a review and template thematic analysis as part of the regular quality assurance assessment in 2021-2022. The results of the full program assessment plan and additional data collection on course practices revealed that the ﬁve dimensions of CB were well-integrated into most educational processes at both the program and course level. We submitted this previously as a preprint and received the following comments:


Introduction
Higher education aims to develop students into becoming lifelong learning professionals who know how to think and behave as good students, good employees and professionals, and good citizens (Schwartz, 2022).As stated as principle 1 in Quality Undergraduate Education in Psychology by the American Psychological Association (APA) (American Psychological Association, 2011), a program should develop students to be responsible for monitoring and enhancing their own learning and to become psychologically literate citizens.Cultivating a set of character strengths is thus equally important to the development of knowledge and skills.However, compared to education of knowledge and skills, it is less clear for lecturers how to guide students to think and behave, that is how to transform students to moral agents who will do good in the world (Berkowitz & Bier, 2007;Halonen et al., 2020;Kristjánsson, 2013).Character building (CB) through intentional instructional strategies is therefore important to achieve the aims of higher education in general and to fulfill the quality principle in psychology programs specifically.
Wright et al. defined character as "integration of a constellation of virtues within personality" (2020, p.188).Character is a complex construct and it includes "cognitive, affective, motivational, and behavioral characteristics" (VanderWeele, 2022, p.177).From the perspective of developmental psychology, we define a character strength as a learnt quality and has moral connotations (Kristjánsson, 2013), because good character strength enables individuals to become competent moral agents and do good in the world (Pike et al., 2021;Sokol et al., 2010).CB resembles raising children as parents preparing them for adulthood and living independently, how to make students independent academic skilled thinkers well prepared for the professional world.Although character strengths can be partly inherited as personality traits, we follow De Regt and van Lenning's discussions (2017) that CB is slow learning and students need time to first establish a value system that leads to certain targeted good behavior.
As for focused character strengths, the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major (American Psychological Association, 2016) have listed for example, self-directedness, open-and fair-mindedness, constructively critical, being ethical, civically engaged, creative and inventive (see "Goal 2 scientific inquiry and critical thinking" and "Goal 3 social and ethical responsibility in a diverse world").As character being one pillar of the Tilburg Educational Profile next to knowledge and skills, the five dimen-sions11https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/about/education/tepare defined as follows at the institutional level.
Intellectual independence: Students are able to independently analyze complex information from different perspectives in order to arrive at a substantiated, personal opinion.
Critical mindset: Students question the ideas, assumptions and beliefs of others and reflect on the backgrounds of their own ideas, assumptions, and beliefs.
Social responsibility: Students are professionally honest and socially committed.They make conscious choices, as professionals and (world) citizens, taking into account the consequences of these choices for others and for society.
Scientific responsibility: Students follow all rules of good and ethically responsible scientific research; they understand the importance and impact of science in a complex (global) society and act upon this accordingly.
Entrepreneurship: Students are enterprising thinkers; they have an enterprising, proactive mentality.They take the initiative to operate successfully, in a context in which they understand what can be expected of them.
These five dimensions of CB are similar to the character strengths listed by the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major (APA, 2016).In addition, the Guidelines also suggest that the development of these strengths should be integrated in the program curriculum design (APA, 2016) and lectures should be provided with didactic models and principles for implementation (Dunn et al., 2010;Halonen et al., 2020).For example, using a logical model based on the notion of constructive alignment (Biggs & Tang, 2007) and the approach of backward design (Berkowitz, 2022) to guide lecturers to define desired characters, make them explicit in the course learning outcomes, determine appropriate assessment methods to gather evidence, and use effective instructional approaches to ensure student development on these traits.

Research Aim & Questions
Compared to primary and secondary education, CB in higher education has been far less implemented and researched (Carr, 2017).Although it has gradually called for a revival and received more attention recently, CB is mostly implemented as extra-or co-curricular activity (e.g., service learning or as part of a honors program) or through dedicated courses (e.g., ethics) (Lamb et al., 2022).To the best of our knowledge, character education at the program level to gradually develop and assess student progress in target character strengths is still under researched.In addition, our university principle of implementation CB is to provides lecturers with support, such as a toolbox, events for sharing experience rather than centralization.This means, every school has autonomy to decide the focus components and how to implement it at the program and course level.Although the implementation hasnever been a top-down approach, we have observed that teaching staffs value CB at the bachelor's psychology program.The main aim of this study is to investigate to what extent and in what way CB and has taken place at the program and course level of our Bachelor Psychology program at Tilburg University.Then based on this analysis, we can find a baseline for further improvements.
We seek to address the following two questions: RQ1.How are the five dimensions of CB implemented at the program level?RQ2.How are these five dimensions implemented at the course level?

Methods
The Bachelor Psychology program is taught in two languages: Dutch (˜350 students) and English (˜350 students).The content of the program in both languages isidentical in terms of program learning outcomes, course learning goals, instructional methods and assessment types, although by its nature the international curriculum puts slightly more emphasis on international aspects of the content of the courses and the cultural diversity of the students.We used 63 courses in the English track for data analysis.
As part of the annual quality assurance of assessment at Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, we made between 2021 and 2022 a full program assessment plan and collected extra data on course practices of CB.It was finalized on 11 th January 2022.Given that this study was conducted as an internal quality assurance process at the program level, obtaining formal approval from the ethics review committee was deemed unnecessary.However, the Vice-Dean of the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences provided authorization for publication of the data.Additionally, all course coordinators provided written consent via email, granting permission for their data to be utilized for this specific purpose.
At the program level, the program learning outcomes (PLOs) were formulated based on the five categories of Dublin Descriptors and Domain-specific Frame of Reference in Psychology.We reviewed the most recent program self-reflection report (SER, in which the meanings of these outcomes were elaborated) to identify the CB outcomes and related each outcome to the five dimensions of CB.
At the course level, each course coordinator filled out a course assessment plan that indicates the PLOs covered, the lecture forms and assessment types (based on the program assessment plan) used in the course, as well as described the examples of instructional activities on the five dimensions of CB.To facilitate this, the academic director formulated the generic prompts (see Table 5) on the five dimensions to guide lecturers to retrospect their CB activities implemented in their courses.
Using a template thematic analysis approach, the course learning goals, lecture forms and assessment methods, examples of the five dimensions, were coded using Atlas.tiqualitative analysis software program.A template analysis is appropriate for our research aim because it integrates both deductive (i.e., the initial template is based on the five dimensions) and inductive (the priori template can be modified based on the emerging themes) approaches (King, 2012).A limited number of tentative themes identified based on either the five dimensions or literature review were used and progressed to the final codes.The second author of this paper who is not a staff member of the Bachelor Psychology program carried out the coding independently.
Note that the number of courses that cover each dimension of CB differs (see Table 2), to compare different percentages of how CB was addressed in the courses (learning goals, instructional activities, and assessment), we normalized the total, which is done by Atlas.ti by choosing the normalization option with showing absolute frequencies (i.e., number of coded texts, quotations) and row-relative frequencies (i.e., distribution of quotations with a table row)11For more explanations, please consult this link: https://doc.atlasti.com/ManualWin.v9/CodeDocumentTable/CodeDocumentTableNormalization.html..

RQ1. How are the five dimensions of CB implemented at the program level?
Our review of the SER shows the program curriculum implements CB by providing students with a broad perspective on psychology and its role in contemporary society and to stimulate students' reflection upon their own skills, goals, and roles.This translates into a recurring emphasis on research ethics, professional ethics, and self-reflection in various courses throughout the curriculum in addition to dedicated courses on ethics, communication and group skills, personal coaching in the Program of Academic Study Success (PASS), as well as dedicated courses on Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Science.
Thirteen of the 24 PLOs related to the five dimensions are mapped in Table 1, which shows that CB is stated in all categories of Dublin Descriptors.This means, the five dimensions of CB are actually integrated with knowledge and skills.For example, to develop students to take social and scientific responsibilities, they first need to acquire knowledge of ethical norms that apply to the profession of psychology (PLO-1.7).For students to become intellectually independent, they first need to develop information seeking (PLO-2.4)and research skills (PLO-2.5).
The frequencies of how often each outcome is covered in the courses are also shown in Table 1.The most frequently covered outcomes are information literacy (PLO-2.4,n = 47), critical reading and evaluation of literature (PLO-3.1,n = 33), and scientific contribution and attitude (PLO-5.1,n = 26).The least frequently covered outcomes are observation (PLO-2.2,n = 8) and interviewing (PLO-2.3,n = 7) skills.
As for the frequencies of the five dimensions of CB covered in the courses, Table 2 shows the results aggregated from each course assessment plan at the program level.Critical mindset (87.30%) is implemented most frequently whereas Social responsibility (38.10%) and Entrepreneurship (38.10%) are least frequently implemented.

RQ2. How are these five dimensions implemented at the course level?
We answer this question by reporting the results on how they are implemented in the educational processes: course learning goals (LGs), instructional activities (i.e., lecture forms and topics of teaching and learning activities), and assessment.

Course learning goals
The course LGs are coded based on their relevance to the five dimensions.In 40 out of the 63 courses (63.49%), part of the LGs are relevant to the five dimensions.In total,114 LGs are relevant to the five dimensions of CB.The example LGs on the five dimensions are: • Intellectual independence: Design, carry out, and report on empirical research.
• Critical mindset: take position on sexual health and abnormalities and substantiate this.
• Social responsibility: be aware of their own influence on others.
• Scientific responsibility: critically analyze research methods (e.g., experiments, observational methods) and state-of-the-art research on emotions.• Entrepreneurship: provide scientifically sound advice on tackling negative relationships (for example, when it comes to loneliness and bullying).
Note that some LGs were coded as multiple dimensions (see Table 3).For example, the goal "demonstrate a professional work attitude in both thesis process (individual and group meetings with supervisors) and product (e.g.effort, independence, working with feedback)" was coded as both Intellectual independence (i.e., professional work attitude, independence) and Critical mindset (i.e., working with feedback).
Although the five dimensions were covered by LGs in most courses, Social responsibility and Entrepreneurship were less frequently stated .

Instructional activities
Table 4 shows the normalized frequencies of lecture forms through which instructional activities on the five dimensions were implemented.Instructional activities on all of the five dimensions are most frequently delivered through interactive lecture forms, such as tutorials, practicals, seminars.While group work is less frequently used compared to interactive and traditional lectures, it is the most frequently used lecture form for Entrepreneurship.
As for the instructional activities on the five dimensions, Table 5 shows some examples of these activities.
Based on the Atlas.tianalyses we found 18 codes in the instructional activities examples described by course coordinators, we further clustered them into six major themes (see Table 6).
Table 7 shows normalized frequencies of these themes on the five dimensions.The most frequent three themes are take initiatives(n = 90.03,e.g., independently gather information from reliable sources for the WAG; formulate their own opinion when using pre-recorded videos; make self study assignments), evaluative judgement(n = 57.17,e.g., reflect on advantages and disadvantages of different methods for certain research questions; discuss shortcomings of literature; evaluate claims and give arguments pro or con), andsocietal relevance (n = 47.07,e.g., there was a Q&A session every week where the materials of last week were applied to current social issues; come up with their own ideas for changing behavior to solve societal problems; work on an inclusion problem at a real organization).
Unfortunately, 23 course activity examples on Scientific responsibility did not mention any specific content to explain what this actually meant.As for the graduation thesis, Social responsibility was not mentioned in the instructional activity example.

Assessment
Based on the program assessment plan, both formative and summative assessments were used for assessing CB.On average, 2.05 assessment types were used per course.Table 8 shows the normalized frequencies of the three assessment methods for assessing the five dimensions.Coursework (e.g., individual or group assignments or presentations, cases) was used most frequently on the five dimensions, especially for assessing Entrepreneurship.Examples of the assessment tasks are "apply the alternative model of personality disorder on a case example", "creatively think and design an approach to conduct an intake", and "critically evaluate the studies they conducted as part of their group paper assignment".
Examination with either selected-(e.g., multiple-choice) or constructed-responses (e.g., short answer or essay) questions was used more frequently to see Critical mindset and Scientific responsibility.Examples of the assessment tasks are "evaluate claims", "critically question whether some results can be generalized across countries", "critically evaluate statistical analysis." Other assessments (e.g., peer feedback, class or group discussion, practicum) were used more frequently for assessing Social responsibility.The graduation project, a thesis, was used for assessing four of the five dimensions, except Social responsibility.Examples of the assessment tasks are "come up with their own ideas for their thesis" and "critically evaluate the literature for their thesis".
Although reflection is mentioned in 33 courses, it was regarded as a teaching and learning activity rather than an assessment type.

Conclusions & Discussions
Our analyses show that the five dimensions of CB have been implemented at both program and course level.Two-third of courses formulated explicit LGs and integrated instructional activities of CB with knowledge and skills outcomes.Instructional activities of CB were delivered mostly through interactive lectures and group work is used most frequently for developing Entrepreneurship.These activities stimulated students to take initiatives, to practice evaluative judgements and to think of societal relevance.Multiple assessment methods and types were used for assessing CB and coursework is the most frequently used method.For example, several courses asked students to apply the NIP ethical codes by the Dutch Institute of Psychologists to solve real cases from patients.
Our study started with our observation that CB has been implemented implicitly.After asking course coordinators to fill out the course assessment plan, the mapping results and examples demonstrate that the bachelor's psychology program has implemented the five dimensions of CB to a satisfactory extent at both program and course level.Our findings are in agreement with studies on character education where the implementation is often implicit, with or without explicit instructional activities and assessment (Halonen et al., 2020;Sokol et al., 2010).But our study shows the implementation of CB is actually implicitly hidden in the course educational processes and we needed to examine this by asking the course coordinators to gather the actual practices.Although CB-related PLOs were defined in the course LGs, to close the loop based on the notion of constructive alignment, the assessment design needs more attention.In the future, we recommend to make CB elements more explicit in the courses starting from the program curriculum design, the formulation of course LGs, design of instructional activities and assessment.
First, the mapping results of the PLOs to the five dimensions of CB need to be further scrutinized by the program curriculum team and then communicated to all actors.This step is a pre-requisite to create a culture and environment that empowers all stakeholders, lecturers and students to co-develop the targeted character strengths (Berkowitz, 2021;Berkowitz et al., 2017).
Second, although CB is formulated as LGs in many courses, we still need to provide course coordinators with more instructions on how to formulate goals specifically to address CB.We observed that some goals were internal.The use of Bloom's taxonomy of the affective domain can guide lecturers to make more observable/measurable LGs and to guide courses across different years of the curriculum to gradually and progressively develop students CB on the five dimensions.
Third, although interactive lectures were used to deliver instructional activities, for students to internalize and characterize the five dimensions into behavioral changes, we need to provide lecturers with more guidance on the use of authentic cases and scenarios to stimulate student thinking from multiple perspectives (e.g., cases made APA PASS11http://pass.apa.org), and to articulating a clear link between behavior and internal thoughts (Shephard, 2008;Sokol et al., 2010).
Fourth, although coursework and other assessment types were used to assess CB, we need to advance lecturers' assessment expertise on more authentic and performance-based assessment (e.g., presentations, solving cases/problems).These alternatives assess actual implementation of targeted dimensions and student analysis of situational complexities and self-evaluation and reflection on their own performance and behavior (e.g., work-based assessment, portfolio assessment).
We conclude that making CB more explicit and structured in the program curriculum and course design is important to implement CB more systematically and effectively.In the future, we should involve more stakeholders to have multiple perspectives on the design of CB and to provide lecturers with more support on implementation of CB.
[[Word count: 3000, excluding Tables and References]] Tables Table 1 Programs Learning Outcomes Relevant to Five Dimensions of Character Building

Table 2
Number of courses that cover each dimension of CB *The total number of courses N = 63.

Table 3
Course Learning Goals Relevant to the Five Dimensions

Table 4
Lecture Forms of Instructional Activities on the Five DimensionsFive dimensions of CB Interactive lectures Interactive lectures Traditional lectures Traditional lectur *Absolute frequencies; **Row-relative frequencies, divided by the normalized total N = 89

Table 5
Teaching and Learning Activities Relevant to the Five Dimensions Students reflect on their role as mental health professional and the impact on their clients' lives.Students are informed that views on the mind have consequences for the way they view / help clients.Scientific responsibilityStudents are educated on scientific responsibility and are stimulated to work accordingly Ethical issues in doing research with human participants is discussed as part of the practicum; broader ethical issues (e.g., societal responsibility as scientists) are discussed in the book and lectures.Students are trained in applying the latest scientific insight on several cases.EntrepreneurshipStudents are stimulated to work creatively on their own projects Students create and pitch their own advertisements.Students need to be creative for the two group writing assignments.

Table 6
The Six Themes and Their Codes

Table 7
Major Themes of Instructional Activities on the Five DimensionsFive dimensions of CB Academic standards Academic standards Application Application Evaluative Absolute frequencies; **Row-relative frequencies, divided by the normalized total N = 57

Table 8
Assessment Methos on the Five DimensionsFive dimensions of CB Coursework Coursework Examination Examination Other Assessments Oth Other Assessments include peer feedback, class or group discussion, practicum, etc.; *Absolute frequencies; **Row-relative frequencies, divided by the normalized total N = 61