Providing a Model of Life Skills Curriculum in Elementary School from the Perspective of Experts

Man is a social being and because of this characteristic, he is bound to learn life skills. Life skills are abilities that are developed with continuous practice and prepare a person to face daily life issues, increase mental, social and health abilities. The World Health Organization has defined life skills as the ability to perform adaptive and positive behavior in such a way that a person can cope with the challenges and necessities of his daily life. Life skills are the kind of cognitive, emotional and practical abilities that are needed for success and happiness in everyday life. Life skills training have been receiving the attention of educational system practitioners in recent years due to the fact that it prepares people to deal with problems and create adaptive behaviors. The main purpose of this study was to provide a model of life skills curriculum in elementary school from the perspective of experts.

The current research was applied in terms of its purpose and qualitative research with thematic analysis in terms of implementation method. The statistical population included various academic experts of the country in the academic year of 2020-21, 14 people were purposefully selected and interviewed until theoretical saturation. The research tool was semi-structured interviews, whose validity was checked with content validity (4 experts including 2 sociologists, 1 psychologist and 1 educational science professor), and for reliability, coders' agreement method was used, and 3 interviews were random. They were selected and coded with another experienced colleague, and the coding agreement rate was 0.94. For data analysis, the coding method (re-oriented and selective) was used.

The results showed that 39 primary themes (open coding), 9 central themes including (family oriented, economic skills, citizenship skills, promotion of moral and religion-oriented skills and in the content dimension environmental skills, critical thinking, media literacy skills and skills Physical-psychological) and 2 selected subjects (purpose and content) as a model of life skills curriculum in elementary school.

Based on the results, it can be concluded that curriculum planners can present life skills in elementary school in the books of this course in the form of two general dimensions of goals and content.