Arab Educational Information Network

In this study, the researcher aims at preparing and teaching a proposed educational unit based on the concepts of moral values which can be embedded in computer course for first stage intermediate students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The researcher adopted two research approaches: the quasi-experimental design which mainly consists of a pre-test and a post-test targeting a single group of participants, as well as the descriptive survey. The former aims at assessing the students’ achievement of knowledge under the effect of the independent variable (the instructional unit), as it suits the specified objectives and questions of the study, while the latter is used by preparing a set of questions within a questionnaire format in order to assess the students' attitudes towards ethical electronic values in the assigned school course. The proposed unit has been prepared by the researcher along with a multiple-choice achievement test to assess whether the designed learning outcomes have been achieved, then the attitude scale has been prepared as well. Validity of both tools has been confirmed and both tools were piloted on the study sample which consisted of 90 randomly chosen female students in the first intermediate stage from 3 purposefully selected schools. The results indicated that there are statistically significant differences between the means of the knowledge achievement tests in favor of the post-test. As of the questionnaire, the results indicated high awareness of ethical electronic violations among the participants. Findings also indicated an effectiveness of the proposed unit in the improvement of students' achievement and attitudes toward computational moral values. Reaching recommendations in the targeted field, the researcher invites the Ministry of Education, curriculum designers and field practitioners to adopt the proposed unit while undertaking developmental efforts in improving and enhancing computing curricula as per the findings of this study which indicated a positive impact. Moreover, the researcher recommends that it is necessary to embed moral values throughout all computing practices in the computer course in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. (Published abstract)