Middle School Students’ Understanding of the Concepts of Protecting Integrity and Combating Corruption in the Prophetic Hadith Curriculum

Abstract

This study aimed at exploring the level of middle school students’ understanding of the concepts of ‘protecting integrity’ and ‘combating corruption’ in the Prophetic Hadith curriculum, and providing a proposal for how to improve students’ understanding of such concepts. To fulfil this purpose, the study was undertaken though the following four stages.  The first stage includes identifying the concepts of ‘protecting integrity’ and ‘combating corruption’ third year middle school students have to understand in the Prophetic Hadith curriculum, and these were found to be 12 concepts and 24 indicators. In the second stage, the researcher identified the extent to which these concepts are covered in the in the Prophetic Hadith curriculum studied by third year middle school students though the content analysis tools, and they were found to be limited. The third stage focused on exploring the level of middle school students’ understanding of these concepts through a) developing a list of 16 concept understanding indicators covering explanation, interpretation, application and concept adoption, and b) preparing a 16-item test to assessing students’ concept understanding. Administering the test to 72 third year middle school students, the researcher found they had a low level of understanding the two types of concepts. Specifically, the students had a mean level of 31.78 % in all the four dimensions of concept understanding as compared to the 80 % level which is identified by the present study. Finally, the fourth stage was concerned with developing a proposal for how to improve students’ understanding of these concepts. The recommendations of the study include: integrating the concepts of ‘protecting integrity’ and ‘combating corruption’ in the Prophetic Hadith curricula taught to middle school students; including the indicators of their understanding in the teachers’ guides; using modern assessment methods testing students’ understanding more properly in the middle school Prophetic Hadith curricula; and training teachers in using recent instructional techniques in developing students’ understanding of the target concepts.