Abstract

To investigate the effect of community of inquiry method on improvement of interpersonal relationship skills, based on Matthew Lipman’s theory and practice, an experiment was designed and conducted in Tehran among primary school students of third, fourth and fifth grades. 190 student were randomly selected and assigned to experimental and control group . The experimental group was taught based on community of inquiry methodology for twelve ninety minute sessions. Interpersonal relationship skills were measured by Ardly & Asher’s questionnaire. Results show that means of both experimental and control group on the pre-test didn't have any significant difference. But, the results of pre-test and post-test of both experimental and control group indicated that the mean of post-test scores of experimental group in relation to pre-test in interpersonal relationship skills increased, while the mean of the control group remained the same in the post-test, and the mean of the experimental group in the post-test was higher than the mean of the control group. In order to investigate the persistence of the treatment effect, the students were rechecked after 4 months, and the results appeared to be stable. Therefore, this semi-experimental study has shown that the community of inquiry method has positively affected interpersonal relationship skills in experimental group of children, with effects that continued for at least 4 months after the treatment