Investigating the Amount of Attention to the Moral Competences of the National Curriculum of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Social Studies Text books of the First Secondary School

Text books play an important role in improving the moral status of students, and in the meantime, the amount of attention the text books to moral skills needs to be investigated. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigating the amount of attention to the moral competencies of the national curriculum of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the social studies text books of the first secondary school.

This study in terms of implementation method was descriptive which in it was used the method of analyzing text books. The research population was the social studies text books of the first secondary school (7th, 8th and 9th) in the 2021-2022 academic years and all three of them were selected as a sample using the census sampling method. The research tool was taking notes of moral competencies of the curriculum in the mentioned books, which whose face validity was confirmed by curriculum experts and specialists, and whose reliability by test-retest method was calculated 0.86. The data as a content analysis were analyzed with using frequency and percentage frequency method of moral competencies of the national curriculum of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the social studies text books of the first secondary school.

The findings showed that in the social studies text books of the first secondary school (7th, 8th and 9th) according to the national curriculum of the Islamic Republic of Iran were identified number of 139 competencies in the three axes of orientation and desire (62 cases), action and behavior (47 cases) and cognition and knowledge (30 cases) that the share of text books for the seventh, eighth and ninth grades was 58, 39 and 42 cases, respectively.
Also, among the 19 moral competencies emphasized in the national curriculum of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the text books of the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades covered only 10, 10, and 12 cases of the competencies, respectively.

According to the results of this study, it is necessary to create and promote moral competencies in the social studies text books of the first secondary school based on the national curriculum of the Islamic Republic of Iran.