Students’ Habits and Values in Elementary Schools with High Level of Effectiveness

Multiple research works conclude that values education is essential for any effective teaching, helps to improve students´ learning and their socioemotional well-being. The objective of this work is to fi nd evidence of the relationship between values education and school effectiveness in elementary schools in the Basque Country. In addition, it will identify the habits and values of elementary school students enrolled in those effective schools with a higher mean score than could be expected once the effects of contextual variables have been monitored by linear hierarchical models, and will pinpoint good practices in the area. A questionnaire was distributed among 391 students (51.9% boys and 48.1% girls) and semistructured interviews were carried out with management teams from three of the schools. The results confi rm that students assess their learning of habits and values positively, but signifi cant differences were found depending on the gender of the participants. Cooperative learning is the strategy most commonly used to teach values in the classrooms. This study offers pedagogical consequences stemming from the different perceptions of habits and values, as well as from a stereotypical performance of the genders.