The Effect of "Philosophy for Children" Program as Community of Inquiry on Improving Interpersonal Relationship of Primary School's Students

To investigate the effect of community of inquiry method on improvement of interpersonal relationship skills, based on Lipman’s theory, an experiment was conducted in Tehran primary schools among students of third, fourth and fifth grade. 190 boy and girl students were randomly selected (97 boys, 93 girls) and assigned to experimental and control groups (88 experimental, 102 control). The experimental group was taught based on community of inquiry method for twelve 90-minute sessions. Cooper, Ardly & Asher questionnaire for students and Vir & Davin questionnaire for teachers were used as the instruments of the study for collecting data about interpersonal relationship skills. To examine the effect of treatment, the collected data were analyzed using various descriptive and inferential statistical techniques such as mean, standard of deviation, ANOVA, paired and independent T test. The comparison of pre-test's means of both experimental and control group didn't show any significant difference. But the results of pre-test and post-test of both experimental and control group indicate that the mean of post-test in experimental group is relatively more than that of pre-test in interpersonal relationship skills while the mean score of control group hasn't undertaken a significant difference in post-test. Moreover, the mean of experimental group in post-test is higher than that of control group in post-test. Besides, to investigate insolubility of implementation effect, again the students were rechecked after 4 months. The results have indicated the insolubility of effect. Therefore, this semi-experimental study has shown that implementing community of inquiry method has positively affected interpersonal relationship skills of the experimental group. The effect that remained unchanged for at least 4 months.