An Intervention Program for the Development of Empathy in Student Teachers

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Abstract
Using Barrett-Lennard's conceptualization of relational empathy, a program for the development of empathetic skills and abilities in student teachers was developed. There were 105 student teachers in the study drawn from a training college in metropolitan Sydney. The independent variables were maturity of moral judgement as measured by Rest's Defining Issues Test, empathetic understanding as measured by Hogan's Scale for Empathy, and communicated empathetic understanding as measured by Gazda's Index of Responding. The intervention program provided students with experiences that have been shown to be related to the development of the processes, structures, and skills involved in empathetic interpersonal relationships. Reliability in the retests of all measures was good (r = .92). Post-tests indicated a significant improvement in communicated empathy. Males improved significantly more than females in their degree of empathetic understanding. Students scoring highly on an authoritarian scale demonstrated significantly less improvement in their empathetic understanding than low scorers. The latter finding may have some implication for the selection of student teachers.

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