The Effects of Philosophy Education on the Social Behavior of the 5th and 6th-Grade Male Students in the Primary Schools of Sarcheshmeh City

From among the major goals of an education system is to create adaptive behaviors in children. Besides, one of the strategies recommended to regulate the children’s behavior is teaching philosophy to them. In this respect, this study is conducted aimed at examining the effects of philosophy education on the social behavior of the 5th and 6th-grade male students in the primary schools of Sarcheshmeh City.

The research design was semi-experimental, with a pretest and a posttest, and a control group. For this purpose, 40 individuals of the 5th and 6th-grade male students in the primary schools of Sarcheshmeh City were randomly assigned into two intervention and control groups by the random name selection, after the whole population was purposefully sampled. The Children’s Social Behavior Scale (CSBS) of Warden et al. was used as the screening tool, and the data collection was conducted in the two pretest and posttest stages. The philosophy education course was run for the children in the intervention group in 10 two-hour sessions. The data were analyzed using ANOVA.

The results indicated that philosophy education for the children led to a significant statistical difference between the pretest and posttest stages in terms of the total score of the social behavior in the intervention group (p<0.001). In the posttest, the intervention group reported a better social behavior than the control one.

Considering the effectiveness of running philosophy education courses for children in improving the social behavior of the 5th and 6th-grade students, running such courses is recommended to improve the children’s social behavior.