Identifying and prioritizing factors affecting the hidden curriculum in first year secondary schools

The hidden curriculum includes values, tendencies, and norms that are implicitly transmitted to students through school culture. This research was conducted with the aim of identifying and prioritizing the factors affecting the hidden curriculum in the first period of secondary schools. The research method was qualitative-quantitative mixed method. In the first part, by analyzing the data of the foundation, the causal factors of the hidden curriculum were identified and in the second part, they were prioritized. In the qualitative section, the statistical population consisted of professors and elites, and in the second section, all principals and teachers of non-government secondary schools in Tehran. In the qualitative section, the number of interviewees was 15, and in the quantitative section, 384 sample people were estimated using Morgan's table and selected using the cluster sampling method. The research tool in the first part is a semi-structured interview, and in the second part, a researcher-made questionnaire based on dimensions extracted from the viewpoints of various experts, whose formal and content validity has been confirmed by academic experts after the study. The reliability of the questionnaire was also equal to 0.90 during the calculation of Cronbach's alpha coefficient. In the qualitative analysis, four categories of physical environment, cognitive environment, administrative environment and social environment were identified as causal selection categories for hidden curriculum in first secondary schools, and the prioritization showed that cognitive environment has a higher priority than other components.