Educational - Ozean Publications

European Journal of Educational Studies 2(2), 2010The third part of the survey asked respondents to indicate the degree of importance of content areas on a scaleranging from one (unimportant) to four (very important) and the degree of implementation of these contentareas on a scale ranging from one (never) to four (very often). As shown in Table 2, the perceived mostimportant content areas were current events (M = 3.77), core values of Oman society (M = 3.75), geography(M = 3.68), environmental education (M = 3.68), history (M = 3.66), family life education (M = 3.66), andpublic issues (M = 3.54). Geography and history, along with the perceived most important content areas,received the highest degree of implementation. The lowest-ranked content areas in both importance andimplementation were sociology, political science, psychology, and law-related education.Dependent t-tests were used to determine if there were statistically significant differences between theperceived importance and perceived implementation of social studies content areas. Utilizing the Bonferronicorrection, the initial alpha level of .05 was divided by 16 (= number of t-tests). Then, the results of the t-testswere compared to the adjusted alpha = .003. As shown in Table 2, statistically significant differences werefound between the perceived importance and perceived implementation on all social studies content areas (p< .003). Specifically, the mean of importance of each content area was significantly higher than that ofimplementation. Effect sizes ranged from a magnitude of 0.25 to 0.72, with the largest effects found onanthropology (d = 0.72) and career education (d = 0.68). It should be noted that content areas with smallereffect sizes were among the most implemented content areas. On the other hand, content areas with largereffect sizes were among the least implemented content areas.181