A Study of High School Students Perceptions of the Attainment of Religion and Life Curriculum Goals in the «Behavioral» domain

The purpose of the present researchwas to examine eleventh graders’ perceptions of the attainment of religion and life curriculum goals inthe “behavioral domain”. According to the curriculum guidelines, this domain consists of seven main subdomains, i.e., religious principles, the Holy Quran, Sira [holy prophet Muhammad’s (P.B.U.H) lifestyle], the Islamic view of the human being, Islamic society, lifestyle, and religion in the modern world. The research method was survey and a goal-oriented evaluation of curriculum. The population of the study included the entire 11th graders in Tehran among whom 420 students were selected through multi-stage cluster sampling method. The instrumentation was comprised of a researcher-made questionnaire whose validity and reliability were approved by psychometric criteria. The obtained data were analyzed usingboth descriptive (such as means and percentages) and inferential statistics (one-sample t test). According to the results,both girls and boysreported that the curriculum goals were attained at a desirable levelin the“religious principles, Holy Quran, and Islamic view of the human being”domains. In the domain of Sira, majority of the students adopted negative attitudes despite the fact that in several cases they stated that the curriculum goals were achieved at a desirable level.In the “Islamic society” domain, the students mainly adoptedpositive attitudesin spite of the fact that some of themcontended that there was an undesirable attainment of goals. In the “lifestyle” domain, majority of students maintained that the curriculum goals were attained at an undesirable level. It is worth mentioning that no significant difference was observed betweenthe perceptions of boys and girls in the seven aforementioned domains.