Moral Issues Among Senior Secondary Students and the Teachers’ Strategies to Mitigate Them

Abstract

Teaching moral values is a challenging endeavor that requires strategic measures, as well as a prime concern of the school since the society is facing unprecedented moral issues among students. Thus, the study aimed to discover observable prevailing moral issues among senior secondary students and the teachers' strategies to mitigate them and promote moral values. Convergent parallel design was used to conduct the study. 48 teachers were selected through the stratified sampling method. Interviews and questionnaires were used as the data collection technique. The data was analyzed and presented through Cresswell's thematic analysis method. The generated themes were operationalized into quantifiable numbers and presented through descriptive statistics. The study discovered new forms of moral issues, which include a lack of environmental hygiene, a lack of decorum, and disrespectful food practices. Further, numerical measures highlighted the most prevalent moral issues, including lack of academic responsibility, lack of environmental hygiene and academic dishonesty. Further, the teachers' contribution to the students' moral development process was also identified. The study revealed nine teaching strategies in which story narration, role modelling, conducive classroom practices and praise and reward stand out as widely used methods. A key limitation of this study is the labor-intensive nature of conducting a comprehensive thematic analysis process and triangulation.

Keywords

• Senior Secondary Student
• Moral Issues
• Values Teaching Strategies
• Moral Education
• Academic Integrity

How to cite