Abstract:

In our country the official curriculum is implemented, which is prepared by an administrative centre of the ministry of national education. This curriculum guides student behavior, learning-teaching activities and their evaluation. A curriculum is the most important instrument which sustains the social and cultural union and ensures sustainability. The ministry of national education has included the subjects related to our direct moral values in its newly developped curriculum in order to maintain our moral values which have been deteriorating rapidly especially in the last decades and leave a viable world to our pupils.In this framework the moral values feature especially in the curriculum of the subjects such as Religious and Moral Studies for Primary Schools, Social Studies, Knowledge of Life, Teaching Reasoning in a detailed way. In this study we have tried to expose in a comparative way the acquisition level of some universal moral values (tolerance, respect, helpfulness, protection and development of cultural values, accuracy, honesty and self-respect) included in the curriculum of Religious and Moral Studies for Primary Schools, Social Studies, Knowledge of Life in primary schools in the Province of Samsun which are different from each other in terms of socio-economic standards. The scenarios developped in accordance with the moral values studied have been carried out with the students. According to the results of the studies we have found out that the students have acquired the moral values studied in the scope of the studies, the least acquired moral value is ‘honesty’, the mostly acquired the moral value is ‘accuracy’ and ‘self respect’. When we studied the level of acquiring the moral values in terms of gender variable, we have also found out that the the highest level of acquisition is ‘accuracy’ among girls and it is ‘respect’ among boys while the least acquired moral value is ‘respect’ among girls and it is ‘self respect’ among boys. When we studied the level of acquisition of the moral values in terms of socio-economic standards` variable we can state that as the socio-economic standards are on the rise the ‘self respect’ is also on the rise, as the socio-economic standards are on the rise the level of ‘respect’ and ‘honesty’ become less. We have also found out that the level of acquisition of the moral value ‘accuracy’ among the students whose families have low income levels is higher than that of the students whose families have high income levels.

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