The Position of Students' Essential Social Skills in Middle School's Core Studies' Textbooks

This research aims to examine middle school's core studies' textbooks on the aspect of being devoted to social skills. To do so, a list of 369 social skills was produced and its face validity and content validity were accepted by specialists in the relevant field. The reliability was calculated by 'the inter-rater reliability'. The main categories of social skills in this list are: communication skills, assertiveness skills, skills concerned with the development of the senses of cooperating, responsibility and altruism, self-regulation skills, skills in social understanding and identifying social values, skills relating to familiarizing with social rules and using social services skills in finding work and remaining in that job, skills in filling free time and taking advantage of leisure and coping skills.
Next, the latest core studies' textbooks used in middle school, including: The Koran (I), The Koran (II), Islamic Insight or Religious Studies (I), Islamic Insight (II), Persian Literature (I), Persian Literature (II), Social Studies, General Geography, The History of Iran and The World, The Farsi Language (I) and Arabic were chosen and their contents were analyzed using the produced check list. In this research the analyzing unit was 'words' and 'content', using the method that wherever words relevant to social skills, or sentences and paragraphs which pointed out definitions of social skills were mentioned, they would be counted.
Findings show that the core studies' textbooks of middle school have details about various and many social skills in content. The most important social skills that the mentioned books point out are: communicating skills (%24.24), social understanding skills (%19.7), self-regulation skills (%16.32), coping skills and reforming wrong beliefs and impressions (%12.31), assertiveness skills (%10.89), and responsibility (%9.6). The three skills that were not mentioned at all or were mentioned in very few places were: skills in filling free time and taking advantage of leisure (%2.74), skills in getting to know social rules (%2.18) and skills in finding work (%1.89). The skills mentioned in every book are discussed separately in this paper.