An Investigation of the Effectiveness of Teaching the Qur’anic Stories on Students' Moral Development

Storytelling has always been of interest and consideration for human beings throughout the history. Stories have been appealing for people and they have played essential roles for developing decent behavior. Focusing on this human natural interest and inclination towards storytelling, the Holy Qur'an has paid great attention to it and has designed and proposed many delicate theological, social and moral issues in the form of the most beautiful stories. This study is intended to investigate the effects of teaching Qur’anic stories on the moral development of primary school students in Khosroushah city in East Azarbaijan province in the academic year of 2016-2017. Hence, a quasi-experimental research of pre-test post-test type, including two experimental and control groups, was conducted. The ethical growth measurement interview was used for data collection. 10 teaching sessions were held to teach Qur’anic stories. According to the research method, sixty of the second grade elementary students were selected by cluster random sampling, 30 of whom, were considered as the experimental group, and were taught the Qur’anic stories 2 hours a week for 2 months. Thirty others were considered as the control group without any exposure to the Qur’anic stories. Covariance analysis was used for the analysis of the data. The findings indicated that teaching Qur’anic stories improves moral development of students in terms of all its components. As a result the use of stories from the Holy Quran is suggested as an effective method for children's moral development.