Value Clarification in the Social Studies: Six Formats of the Values Sheet. Research Bulletin.

One of the major goals of the social studies is to help students gain and refine skills in the area of value clarification. Value sheets, carefully planned activities designed to elicit value clarifying patterns of language from students, are one way of securing value clarification. Sheets, planned in conjunction with ongoing units of instruction, avoid isolating valuing from its important content. Six different formats -- standard, forced-choice, affirmative, rank-order, classification, and criterion -- represent different demands in valuing, from learning to express and share values to identifying a basis for decision making, inventing solutions, organizing preferences hierarchically, linking choice with consequence, and recognizing the relationships among choices, social policies, decision making grounds, and consequences. Two examples for each format indicate some ways that contexts can be chosen from Social studies materials. Each of the value sheets contains the social and scientific context of a situation to which a student reacts or in which a student participates, as well as questions in the form of discussion starters. (JH)