Ann Vaneza Jude and Indhumathi R
Women’s Christian College, Chennai
Pages: 105 – 112
The National Education Policy (2020) seeks to reform the current curriculum to foster in students traditional Indian and fundamental human values, emphasizing the integration of ethical/moral reasoning. Despite state governments’ resistance to this policy’s implementation, a value-based curriculum has been in place in schools for several years, with some even opting to supplement it with mental health sessions. With a growing emphasis on the prevention of bullying and school violence, there is a need to evaluate if existent supplementary education effectively impacts the morals and normative beliefs of students in the context of aggression. As a substantial body of research links the challenging period of adolescence with increasing incidents of both physical and relational aggression, adolescent students form the focus of this analysis. Thus, the objective of this research study was to assess the influence of supplementary valuebased/mental health-based education on moral disengagement and normative beliefs about aggression in adolescents. The sample group included 90 adolescents (13-16 years), of which 30 received value education supplemented with mental health sessions, 30 received only value education and 30 received neither. The Moral Disengagement Scale (Bandura et al., 1996) and The Normative Beliefs About Aggression Scale (Huesmann et al., 2011) were administered to participants. Questionnaires generated using Google Forms were used for data collection. Descriptive statistics and one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were used for data analysis. The study determined that normative beliefs about aggression were significantly lower in adolescents who received value education supplemented with mental health sessions that those who didn’t receive value education, a finding that may reflect the need for supplementary curriculum to be more specifically tailored to subdue unhealthy beliefs about school violence.
Keywords: moral disengagement, aggression, value education, adolescents, mental health