The impact of the philosophy for children curriculum on increasing the students' cognitive skills, concerning the components of the economic education of the Iranian education transformation document

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the philosophy for children curriculum on the cognitive skills of the students, concerning the components of the economic education of the Iranian education transformation document. It was a mixed methods study, and also it was an applied one. The quantitative section of the study was quasi-experimental with the pretest posttest design. The statistical population consisted of 60 first-grade high school female students from all Behnamir city high schools who were randomly assigned into control and experimental groups. The research instrument was a researcher-made questionnaire and its validity was confirmed by Cronbach's alpha (0.808). The treatment consisted of ten teaching sessions (each session was 70 minutes) in which there was reading and discussing Old Persian fables and its results were compared with the pretest data. The qualitative section of the research was carried out using the semi-structured interviews with 20 members of the experimental group. The data of the quantitative section of the research were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics (Kolmogorov-Smirnov and F-test for two independent groups and analysis of covariance). In the second section of the study, Mayring’s qualitative content analysis (deductive categorization approach) was used to interpret the interview data. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrated that the use of the philosophy for children curriculum has a positive and significant impact on the cognitive growth of the high school students in terms of the components of the economic education. Thus, the aforementioned curriculum could improve the cognitive skills of the students in the economic education respect.