JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL INNOVATIONS
Year:2004 | Volume:3 | Issue:7|Papers Count:8

The main objective of this research was to investigate the relationship between creativity and personality traits of the 3rd grade secondary school and pre-college students in Tehran. A group of 250 boys and girls were randomly selected from the population mentioned above. Torrance Test of Creativity and personality test of NEOAC-R were administered on the sample group to assess their creativity levels and personality traits. After gathering and analyzing data, the following results were found:1. It was shown that boys were more creative than girls.2. The traits related to neuroticism were higher among girls than boys.3. A positive relationship between creativity and personality factors of Extroversion (E), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (0) was shown.4. There was no significant relationship between creativity and personality factors of Neuroticism (N) and Agreeableness(A).

The process and plan of "globalization", which appeared after the 2ndWord War in the most industrialized Western countries, have spread into the other industrialized countries and it is rapidly expanding across all over the world. This process and plan has shown itself as one of the most challenging issues of the past and present decade for all human cultures and is deeply influencing the value system and the identity of adolescents and youths in Iran and elsewhere. The value system, or the desired and internal qualities within ones psychological structure, is the main layers of a person’s personality and identity which forms the basis of his/her attitude system and behavior. Modern studies on the individual’s value systems are mostly conducted by the social and educational psychologists of the west countries and based by and large on the Anglo-American understanding of human life. These studies on value system have considered neither eastern philosophy of life nor the Islamic or Iranian culture into account and, therefore, we may not necessarily recognize them as a legitimate global value system. It is necessary, consequently, to investigate the quality of value system of Iranians (specifically high-school students) and inquire the influence of their attitudes toward "globalization" on their value system.The theoretical basis of studying the value system of our adolescents and youths is to face the main values of Islamic-Iranian culture in opposition to their counter values to discover how much their value systems are in close proximity to their classical culture. On this basis, in the first part of our study entitled "Investigating the status of Iranian high-school & pre-university students' attitude toward globalization and its effect on their value system and their religious and national identity", we have applied psycho-educational assessment techniques and created an indigenous scale for assessing value system. The validation of our scale has been conducted by means of two procedures: investigating content validity of the scale by asking professionals to value the relevance of each and all 135 items; and conducting a pilot study on a sample of 568 high-school students of grades 9, 10, 11, and 12 and applying factor analysis to investigate the construct validity of the scale. Our validity justification studies showed that ten categories of individual values, family values, economic values, political values, social values, artistic values, scientific and theoretical values, religious identity values, national identity values, and worldviews (or globalization) values might be distinguished in our value system assessment scale.

In the past few centuries, globe has gone through many changes. The outstanding appearance of these developments is the industrial revolution of 17th century. The modernity as an idea has progressed in the same period of time. The most important feature of modernity is "humanism". West is the origin of this modern civilization and the concept of "humanism" has gradually spread over the non-western lands. Islam as one of the non-western civilization with a religious identity should meet this modern civilization. Modernity has encountered Islamic civilization and Moslem thinkers have faced it in different ways. The first organized effort to react the modernity issues in the field of education started in 1977, when Moslems Education Conference was held in Mecca to search for the main strategies needed for the islamification of human sciences. Although, several years have passed since that event, even those who claimed such an idea are not satisfied with this accomplishment. The reason why this idea and, consequently, its educational concerns were not fulfilled is the problematic aspect of the present study. Regarding this matter, three questions were formed: What are the most important approaches toward islamization of sciences? What are the effects of islamization of sciences on the aims and contents of education? What are the main obstacles of the desired fulfillment of islarnization of sciences and education? In this article, the study of educational implication of islamization of sciences, and also respond to above questions, is set forth.  

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of primary-school students’ self-regulation strategies in solving (usual & unusual) mathematical problems. The population of the study was the 4thgrade students of the City of Fassa from which 36 boys and girls students of the 4th grade were purposefully selected. The results of the study are obtained from investigating the students mathematical tasks, observing the process of tasks accomplishments, and conducting interviews with the students concerning mathematical problem solving. Data analysis and explanation of the study results indicate that while students' self-regulation strategies have not significant role in solving usual mathematical problems they are significantly influential in solving unusual mathematical problems.

This article provides a short historical background of curriculum development and textbook preparation for primary and secondary schools in Iran. It further describes the concept and components of Curriculum Theory and reviews the viewpoints of the contemporary western theorists who have discussed and categorized curriculum theories. It also points out that these curriculum theories have their origins in the western philosophical, psychological and sociological doctrines and they provide guidelines for curriculum planners of those societies. The article then highlights some educational problems in Iran that have emerged over the past years due to the lack of a home-grown curriculum theory. Therefore, the article emphasizes the necessity of formulating an indigenous curriculum theory to serve as a guide for curriculum planners and textbook compilers of the country.By presenting some evidence and examples the article argues that the indigenous Curriculum Theory and its components can be drawn up from the Islamic world view as well as from Moslem educational literature.

Providing new editions and improving textbooks contents are urgent requirements of education system in any country. Therefore, we should frequently plan, edit, and alter the contents of textbooks to coordinate students learning with the global and national trend of development. Moving along this direction "The Writing-Editing Group of Religious Textbooks and Koranic Bureau" within the Board of Education started to compile two new books named "Divine Gifts" and "Work Book". Since these books are recently published and used in schools we have applied content analysis method of "William Romey" to see if the new books are better implementing the students learning religious matters. According to our study, the obtained results of analyzing the content of previous "Religious Textbook published in 2001" and "Devine Gifts & Work Book published in 2002" for the 2ndgrade students indicate that the involvement coefficient of students with the passages and images of the above mentioned three books are relatively low but the involvement coefficient of students with questions presented in the "Devine Gifts & Work Book" is as high as 1.1. The results of the study also showed that the involvement coefficient of students with the previous "Religious Textbook" was 0.41 but the involvement coefficient of students with "Devine Gifts & Work Book" was 1.2 which means that the new books prepared better to accomplish the goal of students involvement on the books. In other words, the previous book is poor and has a low involvement index but the new book causes students to be more involved with its content.