An Analysis of the Status of moral values in Primary School Textbooks: Shannon Entropy Method

The present study aimed to analyze the status of ethical values in elementary school textbooks. In terms of the research method, it is descriptive, based on content analysis method. The corpus to be analyzed included five textbook titles of the elementary school – Farsi, Let’s Read, Farsi, Let’s Write, Social Sciences, Heavenly Gifts, and Teaching Quran – purposively sampled during academic years 2018-19. Content analysis list of seventeen ethical values, including justice, chastity, fight against injustice, courage, sacrifice, humility, patriotism, trusteeship, Sympathy, Perseverance, honesty, patience, benevolence, respect, appreciation, keeping promises, and forgiveness constituted our data collection tool, whose validity was determined by using experts’ opinions. The collected data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics indices in Shannon entropy analytical process. The results of the analysis revealed that the above ethical values were mentioned 413 times in the selected textbooks: Farsi, Let’s Read (122 times), Farsi, Let’s Write (63 times), Social Sciences (61 times), Heavenly Gifts (87 times), and Teaching Quran (80 times). In terms of the relative importance index, the following six ethical values were among the most important values highly noted in the selected textbooks of the elementary school: courage (0.066), appreciation (0.066), sacrifice (0.065), benevolence (0.064), patriotism (0.063), and patience (0.06).