Value clarification approach in value education – An impact study

Education to be made responsive to the needs and aspirations of the society, the teacher education has to be reoriented, in its aims and approaches, curriculum and strategies. Teacher education is found to be failing to build up necessary attitudes and values in the members of the teaching profession, which are reported to be deteriorating. Partially this may be due to ineffective value development programs in teacher training. Traditionally value development programs in teacher training involve (i) Direct exhortative methods and (ii) Indirect methods through activities and programs. It is very appropriate here to note that value clarifying strategies have been reported to be better in developing values. Hence value clarifying strategies needs to be emphasized and should be interwoven in the curriculum. With this background, a set of value education activities was developed for trainees of D.Ed course, using five methods of value clarifying strategies. The package was implemented under an experimental design. The results exhibit a better level of value infusion in the trainees experiencing methods of value clarifying strategies against those experiencing the other conventional methods as lecture and incidental methods including routine activities of the institution. This leads to the conclusion that Value Clarification Approach in value education is found to have a better impact on D. Ed teacher trainees, than the conventional methods of value education.