High School Students' Views On Values Education in Religious Culture And Moral Knowledge Course (A Case Study in Şanlıurfa)

Values education is a subject that is emphasized excessively both in Turkey and around the world and would be seen more and more in curriculums day by day. One of the main function of education is to raise ideal people and citizens. One of the tool that is being used to achieve this goal is the curriculum for the main education process. In our curriculum, the aims that are related to values education are mostly taking part in the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge courses. The values that are tried to be instilled to students in this course have been the subject of academic researches. The changes of these values in the curriculum have been examined over the years. In addition to this, researchers have looked into curriculum to find out which values were taking part more often. Also studies were carried out on importance of values for the primary and secondary education. There have been number of researches carried out to reveal the essence of moral education by seeking opinions of Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge teachers and teacher candidates who will also be teaching this very course. DKAB course is being taught in primary and secondary education for a total of nine years. Nevertheless it is has been observed that there aren't many studies on the extent to which the course outcomes in general and the values intended to be imparted in this course in particular resonate with the students. When the studies were examined, no independent study was found regarding the opinions of students on this subject which is one of the most important elements of education and the reflections of this course on the learners. In this research, aims that are related to values education in DKAB courses have been evaluated based on the opinions of high school students. In this research, interview technique, one of the qualitative research methods, was used. A semi-structured interview form consisting of 10 questions was used as a data collection tool in the research. Descriptive and content analysis techniques have been used to analyze the datas that are obtained from the interviews conducted with 28 high school students. Students mainly consider the learnings that are related to the values in DKAB courses, necessary and important. Even so, as a result of the interviews with the students, it is seen that there are some deficiencies in the use of the learnings related to values in real life. In addition, students stated that the values obtained at school and social environment often do not fit with each other. The results obtained from the research reveal that student-centered learning environments have an important role in meaningful learning of values.