The Extent of Including Life Skills in the Islamic Education Curriculum for the First Grade of Basic Education in Libya: An Analytical Study and a Proposed Framework for Its Development

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the extent to which the Islamic Education curriculum for the first grade of basic education in Libya incorporates the life skills necessary for the balanced development of learners' personalities. It examined the life skills embedded in the prescribed textbook—whether explicit, implicit, or absent—and proposed an enrichment framework to strengthen these skills within the curriculum. The researcher adopted the descriptive analytical approach through content analysis, applying it to the Libyan-approved Islamic Education curriculum for the academic year 2025-2026. The study sample comprised all thirty-nine (39) instructional units in the textbook. A content-analysis checklist covering six main domains of life skills, comprising 43 behavioral indicators, was developed and validated by a panel of specialized referees; inter-rater reliability, computed using Holsti's formula between two independent coders, reached 0.93 (an agreement rate of 93.02%), indicating high consistency.

The results revealed a marked disparity and a clear deficiency in the distribution of life skills within the curriculum content, with an overall availability rate of 58.1%. Religious and value-based skills ranked first with full availability (100%), followed by basic thinking skills (75.0%), health and environmental skills (66.6%), social skills (58.3%), and work and daily-life skills (50.0%), while personal skills ranked last with the lowest availability rate (44.5%). The findings also indicated a predominance of theoretical/cognitive content over practical/applied skill content across most units, along with a notable weakness in teamwork and positive-thinking skills, contrasted with moderate inclusion of scientific values and soft skills. In light of these results, the study recommended reconstructing the Islamic Education curriculum to ensure the explicit and balanced inclusion of life skills across all domains, and it presented a proposed enrichment framework with concrete pillars and implementation mechanisms, in addition to suggesting similar studies on other grades and subjects.