Determine the Desirable Characteristics of the Elements of Social Studies Curriculum in order to Provide a Model for Improving Primary School Student's Problem Solving Skills and Its Evaluation from Curriculum Specialists and Related Teacher's Viewpoint

The aim of this research was to determine the desirable characteristics of the elements of social studies curriculum in order to provide a model for improving primary school student's problem solving skills and its evaluation from curriculum specialists and related teachers’ viewpoint.
It was an applied research that it was done by field study research. First, based on the theoretical foundations of the subject, the desirable characteristics of four elements of social studies curriculum (objectives, content, teaching and learning methods and evaluation) were identified and a model for improving primary school student's problem solving skills in this course was presented. Statistical population involved all curriculum specialists and primary school teachers in Guilan province (45 specialists and 8641 teachers) in academic year 20152016 that among them, all curriculum specialists by census method and 360 primary school teachers by cluster random sampling method were selected as the sample. A researcher made questionnaire was used to collect data. Its validity was confirmed based on curriculum specialists and primary school teachers’ viewpoint and its reliability was confirmed by Cronbach's alpha (.98). The data was analyzed by descriptive statistics (frequency tables and percentage) and inferential statistics (chi-square test).
Findings: The findings indicated that the proposed model for social studies curriculum in order to improving primary school student's problem solving skills was desirable from curriculum specialists and primary school teachers’ viewpoint. Also, there was not a significant difference between curriculum specialists and related teachers’ viewpoint about the desirability of the proposed model (P >.05). Therefore, we can use this model to develop student's problem solving skills in primary school social studies course.