Development of a debate strategy model in teaching Tawhid for Saudi secondary schools / Al Haqbani Mohammad Hejab

• Main Author: Al Haqbani , Mohammad Hejab
• Format: Thesis
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: BV1460 Religious Education; LB1603 Secondary Education. High schools
• Online Access: http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15061/2/Al_Haqbani.pdf; http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15061/1/Al_Haqbani.pdf; http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15061/

The major purpose of this study was to develop an activity-based debate strategy implementation model for the teaching of the subject of Tawhid at secondary schools. The reason for the development of the model was to propose how debate strategy could be used to support the conventional classroom teaching in aiding the students to fulfil their learning objectives through a network of debate teaching activities. The approach adopted by the study was the Design and Development Research approach that was proposed by Richey and Klein (2007). Following the approach, the model development was carried out in three phases. The first phase focused on need analysis through the use of a survey questionnaire which was administered to 200 secondary school students in Saudi schools in order to establish the need to adopt debate in the process of teaching the subject of Tawhid. The second phase of the study was where the model was developed using Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) method with the help of a panel of eight (8) experts. The study also used nominal group technique (NGT) to facilitate the experts’ discussions on the identification of the teaching activities to be included in the model. The third phase of the study was carried out through another panel of experts of 20 members who were tasked with the evaluation of the model through the use of a modified Fuzzy Delphi technique. The evaluation was entirely based on the experts’ responses where they were given a seven-likert linguistic scale survey questionnaire. The findings of the study for the first phase revealed that there is need for in-class debate based on the views of the students as larger percentage of the students does not understand the subject of Tawhid through the current method of teaching. In addition, majority of the students think that using debate for the teaching of Tawhid will likely solve all the problems they face in their learning process of the subject. The students also showed high acceptance level and willing to participate in in-class debate in Tawhid’s class. Moreover, the findings of the second phase of the research led to the development of the model comprising of 39 teaching activities which were determined by a panel of experts. Also, based on the experts’ views, the teaching activities were classified into three learning domains and four different clusters in order to simplify the interpretation of the role of the teaching activities. The findings of the final phase of the model revealed that the experts had a consensual agreement (d = 79.15) in terms of the selected Tawhid teaching activities (Amax = 15.833), relationship among the teaching activities (Amax = 15.333), classification of the teaching activities (Amax = 16.333), and the overall evaluation of the model (Amax = 16.533) with the values exceeding the minimum of 14. Conclusively, the model shows how a more active learning method of debate could be incorporated into the more conventional and traditional lecture method by incorporating debate strategy in the traditional lecture method of teaching Tawhid subject. The findings of the study have practical, theoretical as well as methodological contributions