What Does 'Value' Evoke For Children? A Detection Study as to Transferring Values to Daily Life

Many studies have been carried out because of the importance of values education in recent years. The studies have shown their effects on the curriculum of 2005. In many classes it is aimed to provide individuals with the gains kneaded with appropriate values. Social Studies are one of them. However, no satisfactory studies as to whether the values envisaged in this class are gained or not have been conducted up to now. Therefore, how the children interpret the values and mirror them in daily life was investigated. The study was made through the use of phenomenological pattern, one of the qualitative methods. This pattern was preferred to determine what the children know about the values, a phenomenon term and how they transfer what they know to their daily life. The study including typical sampling was conducted together with 58 students in elementary school in Hendek, Sakarya Province. 12 values (honesty, respect, good health, self-regulatory, conciliatory, responsibility, patience, fairness, affection, self-confidence, benevolence, courage) taught in Social Studies were chosen to be asked such kind of questions as "What does...(value) evoke for you? Can you give an example for this value from your daily life?" The answers of the questions were subject to content analysis. Statements were encoded for every value and themes were obtained thanks to these codes. Immediately afterwards, the themes were confirmed by receiving an expert opinion. The relationship between what the values evoke and examples given by the students was predicated as a frequency. At the end of the study, it was determined that the values like benevolence, good-health and responsibility were correctly perceived while the ones like self-confidence, self-regulatory were not interpreted by the students. The concepts that the students confused these values with were also detected. (Contains 1 footnote.)