The formation of children’s values in school is at the core of primary school curricula and educational frameworks in Europe (e.g., Lehrplan 21, Department of Education, 2014). Values express broad goals (kindness, curiosity) that are important to a person in life, and they direct human behaviour (Bardi & Schwartz, 2003). Schools are expected to develop children’s understanding of their own and others’ values, children’s ability to express their own values and pursue behaviours that help achieving them. According to the model of competences for democratic culture proposed by the Council of Europe (2016), “values are general beliefs that individuals hold about the desirable goals that should be striven for in life. They motivate action and they also serve as guiding principles for deciding how to act” (p. 36). Research into value development in childhood and adolescence is scarce, but there has been a steep increase of publications, in recent years (e.g., Döring, Daniel, & Knafo-Noam, 2016), which highlight the impact of the social context and value-based educational goals (Döring, Makarova, Herzog, & Bardi, 2017), and of the school (Berson & Oreg, 2016). However, the field is still surprisingly under-researched, and there is a lack of evidence of how children’s values develop and how they are formed in school.
Being conceptually grounded in Schwartz’s (1994, 2012) theory of human values – the most researched theoretical values framework – this symposium brings together empirical research from Switzerland and Italy. The discussant is from the UK. It addresses the following research questions:
- Do children and their teachers hold similar values?
- What is the relationship between children’s value priorities and their value-related behaviours in the school context?
- How do value priorities of primary school children differ in an analogue and digital research setting?
The first presentation by Auer investigates value similarities between primary school children and their teachers and between primary school children and their parents. The second presentation by Scholz-Kuhn, Muff, Makarova, and Bardi provides insights from an SNSF project on ‘The formation of children’s values in primary school’, showing the interplay between values and value-related behaviours in the school context. The third presentation by Oeschger and Makarova presents and compares the results on children's value priorities when conducting a survey in an analogue and digital research setting.
Given the lack of research on the formation of children’s values in the school context, all three presentations present highly novel findings in the field, aiming to help fill this gap through studying children’s values in the school context. The discussion by Anna Döring is integrating the empirical findings from the three studies and developing a roadmap for future research on value development and values education.
This symposium in interdisciplinary, integrating viewpoints from educational sciences and psychology.
