مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد بررسی زمینه آموزش شخصیت به کودکان در مدارس پیش دبستانی و ابتدایی – الزویر 2021

Abstract

Keywords

1. Introduction

2. Materials and methods

3. Results

4. Themes of character education

5. Pedagogy of moral and character education

6. Discussion

Funding source

Declaration of competing interest

Acknowledgements

References

Abstract

The objective of this study was to explore the contents of moral and character education for children and the pedagogy or approach employed by parents and teachers to teach character and moral education for children. The study was conducted in 18 schools found in East Gojjam, West Gojjam and Awi administrative zones. Preprimary and primary school teachers (N = 272) and one of the parents of children (N = 272) participated in the study. Concurrent mixed design was employed and quantitative and qualitative data were gathered using questionnaire and document analysis respectively. Descriptive statistics was employed to analyze the quantitative data and thematic analysis was applied to analyze qualitative data. The study found that among the six categories of character (caring, honesty, emotional intelligence, responsibility and respect) parents emphasized on teaching children to be honest (M = 2.6,SD = 0.46) and responsible M = 2.48,SD = 0.38) to their actions and behaviors. Teachers give high emphasis for teaching children to be respecting and caring to others and to Fairness (M = 2.62, SD = 0.43) and Respect (M = 2.63,SD = 0.37). Advising is the most frequently used common approache used by parents and teachers. Besides, using fairy tales with animal characters and songs are mostly found to be important approaches to teach character education about right and wrong behaviors to children. The study reveals that there are pieces of moral and character contents included across different subjects. Yet, there is a challenge in providing character and moral education as a separate subject in schools and failure of parents and teachers to be good role models for children.

1. Introduction

The term “character”, refers to basic moral values such as caring, honesty, justice, responsibility and respect for themselves and others (Character Education Partnership, 2003 cited in Heidari, Nowrozi, & Ahmadpoor, 2016)) while character education means a systematic, comprehensive and planned approach to teach moral values. Likewise, moral development is defined as the process through which children acquire the concepts of right and wrong as well as the ability to regulate behavior to adhere to standards deemed appropriate by society (Kochanska, 1994; Prosic-santovac et al., 2018 cited in Termini & Golden, 2014).

Moral education is defined as a form of education that aims to promote students’ moral development and character formation (Nucci and Narvaez, 2008 cited in Han, 2014).and it consists of virtue ethics, moral reasoning, and moral emotion-based education.

Moral is a social construct and children born in each society are expected to learn the values and morals of their society. Every society needs young children to learn its moralistic values so that the children develop into moral adults later (Althof & Berkowitz, 2006). Schools are the major institutions for preparing children for life, both academically and morally. Yet, little is known about how teachers enact social and moral value programs in the classroom (Johansson, Brownlee, Cobb-moore, & Boulton-lewis, 2011).