Results from a pre- and post-instruction assessment shows high school students can shift from simplistic, punitive views of aggression to more empathetic, emotionally-aware understandings
Sharyn Clough and Devlin Montfort
By Colin Bowyer, Communications Manager - June 11, 2025
Historically, U.S. public education priorities have reflected an assumption that most children will naturally develop social/emotional skills without the need for any formal training in school. However, adolescents are reporting less empathy than their age-mates in earlier decades while partisan hostility is on the rise.
The promotion of social/emotional learning (SEL) in public education settings has been gaining traction in the U.S. to induce skills like empathy, but success is hard to measure and the focus is typically on elementary-age students. Recent research from scholars in the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Engineering uses a novel measurement technique to show that learning Peace Literacy—a new kind of SEL curriculum—can help mitigate aggression in adolescents through the development of empathy.
The research article “Peace Literacy as Conceptual Change: A Pilot Study,” by Dr. Sharyn Clough, professor of philosophy, Dr. Devlin Montfort, associate professor of engineering, and Sophia Betts, ‘23 was recently published in the journal Precollege Philosophy and Public Practice.
Peace Literacy, a concept founded by former Army officer Paul K. Chappell and expanded into a research and curricular program by Dr. Clough, draws from the growing field of social and emotional learning, but pushes further, proposing a revolutionary framework for cultivating empathy and reducing conflict.
“Peace Literacy is not just about being kind,” Clough explained. “It’s about building a set of skills, like reading or algebra, that students can learn, practice, and refine over time.”
The article details a collaborative study in which Clough, Montfort, and Betts developed a survey to assess students’ understanding of aggression and empathy that was then distributed in high school health classes. The questionnaire asked students to describe a moment in their lives when they became aggressive and, then, when someone became aggressive with them. Importantly, the students were also asked to explain why the aggression occurred. After two months, the students received instruction in Peace Literacy from their health teacher, and they filled out the questionnaire again.
The results were striking: after Peace Literacy instruction, students demonstrated an improved ability to empathetically link emotional states with aggressive behaviors, in themselves but especially in others. The students’ responses were also much more sophisticated and thoughtful.
“For many adolescents aggression is like a handrail—it provides a sense of agency when they’re feeling helpless. It’s not something that we can just tell them to stop using. We have to replace it with skills that provide a healthier form of agency,” said Clough. “When teenagers are being aggressive, it’s less helpful to view them as ‘bad,’ and more helpful to view them as unskilled in managing various kinds of distress, just as they might be unskilled in algebra or writing. With a growth mind-set they can get better.”
Using a conceptual change analysis to examine the students’ responses to the questionnaire, Montfort, whose background is in engineering education, likens Peace Literacy education to physics education—in both cases, students come to class equipped with an informal understanding of how the relevant concepts like aggression and gravity work. By paying attention to the concepts that students come in with, researchers can design more effective curricular tools to help students level up their understanding.
“Physics is one of the more deterministic sciences, where there are clear explanations about force, acceleration and mass,” explained Montfort. “It's helpful to compare Peace Literacy concepts to physics concepts because they are useful in a similar way. Students already have ideas about aggression and empathy, and we are trying to help them organize those ideas into useful models that help them better predict and explain the world."
The article also highlights the broader implications of Peace Literacy in today’s polarized world. With rising partisan hostility and declining empathy among adolescents, Clough, Montfort, and Betts argue that high schools should take a more active role in teaching emotional and interpersonal skills through SEL curriculum like Peace Literacy. As the need for understanding aggression becomes increasingly obvious on the global political landscape, Peace Literacy interventions are positioned to be of broad curricular value.
“It’s not surprising that teenagers are showing decreased empathy overall,” said Clough. “They absorb what’s going on around them and we can’t assume caregivers have the time, skills, or resources to reverse this trend on their own. Incorporating the Peace Literacy curriculum in classrooms offers a structured, evidence-based way to help students grow into more empathetic citizens who can better predict and prevent aggression in themselves and others.”