Islamic Moral Education Module for Preschoolers Validated Through Expert Consensus

In a finding that could reshape how values-based education reaches the youngest learners, researchers in Malaysia have validated a preschool teaching module designed to instil core Islamic virtues in children aged four to six. The study, published in the International Journal of Early Childhood, demonstrates that a carefully structured moral education curriculum rooted in the Prophetic tradition can achieve strong expert consensus on its relevance, cultural suitability, and classroom practicality—a result with implications well beyond Islamic schools.

The module, known as the Akhlak Nabawiyyah (ANa) Teaching Module, takes its name from the Arabic term for Prophetic character. It is built around five cardinal virtues drawn from the Sirah Nabawiyyah, the recorded life and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad: patience (ṣabr), diligence (ijtihād), compassion (raḥmah), honesty (ṣidq), and trustworthiness (amānah). Rather than treating these as abstract theological concepts, the module translates them into age-appropriate pedagogical activities—stories, songs, role-play, and structured daily routines—that align with how preschool children actually acquire moral understanding.

Moral education in early childhood is not a new idea, but the scientific consensus on its importance has hardened considerably in recent decades. Longitudinal research in developmental psychology has repeatedly shown that the years before formal schooling are a critical window for shaping emotional regulation, prosocial behaviour, and the rudimentary sense of fairness that underpins later civic values. Character education scholars such as Thomas Lickona and the research-driven frameworks advanced by Marvin Berkowitz and colleagues have argued that effective moral education requires deliberate, structured intervention rather than incidental modelling alone. The ANa module was designed with precisely this logic: to convert the moral content of Islamic tradition into a systematic, teachable, and assessable curriculum component.

The research team, led by Nur Adillah Ramly of Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, together with Abdul Halim Masnan, Syaubari Othman, and Siti Nordarma Ab Rahman of University Sains Malaysia, faced a familiar problem in curriculum design research: how do you demonstrate that a new teaching module is actually fit for purpose before it is deployed at scale? Their answer was a two-part methodological architecture that borrows from programme evaluation theory and consensus-based expert validation.

The first pillar is the Context, Input, Process, Product (CIPP) model, an evaluation framework developed by Daniel Stufflebeam that has become a mainstay of educational programme assessment. CIPP forces designers to interrogate a curriculum from four angles. The Context dimension asks whether the module addresses a genuine need in its intended setting—in this case, Malaysian Islamic preschools operating under the national KSPK preschool curriculum standard. The Input dimension examines whether the resources, content, and materials are adequate and appropriate. The Process dimension evaluates whether the proposed teaching activities are feasible and coherent in real classroom conditions. Finally, the Product dimension considers whether the intended outcomes—the internalisation of the five target virtues—are realistically achievable through the module as designed.

The second pillar is the Modified Nominal Group Technique (NGT), a structured consensus method originally developed by Delbecq, Van de Ven, and Gustafson in the 1970s for programme planning. NGT is prized in educational and medical research because it balances the benefits of group deliberation against the pathologies of group dynamics. In its modified form used here, a panel of experts works partly in silence and partly in structured discussion, generating, ranking, and scoring evaluation items without allowing a single dominant voice to steer the outcome. This is a meaningful departure from conventional expert review, where a panel of evaluators discussing a curriculum face-to-face can fall prey to anchoring effects, hierarchy effects, and social pressure toward premature agreement.

For this study, the researchers assembled a panel of eight experienced Islamic preschool teachers, each with established credentials in early childhood education. The choice of practitioners rather than purely academic experts was deliberate: the question at hand was not whether the module was theoretically elegant but whether it could survive contact with real classrooms. The teachers evaluated the ANa module against the CIPP dimensions, rating items related to content relevance, structural organisation, cultural appropriateness, and practical applicability.

The results were striking in their consistency. The panel achieved expert agreement of at least 80 percent—a threshold widely treated as evidence of substantive consensus in NGT studies—across all major evaluation domains. The teachers endorsed the relevance of the module’s content to the moral development needs of preschoolers, its structural coherence as a teaching resource, its cultural suitability for the Malaysian Islamic preschool context, and, critically, its feasibility for everyday classroom implementation. In curriculum validation research, where expert panels frequently fragment over pedagogical philosophy or workload concerns, this level of agreement across all four CIPP dimensions suggests the module strikes a rare balance between doctrinal fidelity and practical teachability.

The methodological rigour matters because Islamic character education modules have often been developed and disseminated with limited formal validation. Previous Malaysian studies have noted both the promise of Islamic character education interventions and persistent gaps between module design and classroom implementation. By subjecting the ANa module to a structured consensus procedure anchored in an established evaluation model, the research team has produced something comparatively rare in the field: an evidence-based values education package whose claim to validity rests on documented expert judgment rather than assertion.

There is also a broader policy frame. The authors explicitly align the module with Sustainable Development Goal 4.7, the UNESCO education target that calls on education systems to ensure learners acquire knowledge and skills for sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity. At first glance, connecting a Prophetic tradition-based character module to a global citizenship agenda might seem like a stretch. But the underlying logic is coherent: values education that anchors children in a positive cultural and moral identity is increasingly understood as a foundation for the kind of engaged, tolerant citizenship that SDG 4.7 envisions. Children who internalise patience, compassion, honesty, and trustworthiness within their own cultural framework are, in principle, better positioned to engage respectfully with those outside it.

The developmental rationale for starting at preschool age is similarly grounded. Social learning theory, articulated by Albert Bandura, holds that children acquire behaviour patterns largely through observation and imitation of valued models. Preschool classrooms are among the most concentrated environments of adult modelling a young child will ever encounter, which makes them a uniquely efficient venue for virtue-based instruction. The ANa module’s designers leveraged this by embedding the five virtues in repeated, embodied routines rather than one-off lessons—consistency that behaviourists and character educators alike identify as essential for habituation at this age.

For educators and policymakers, the study’s practical significance lies in its portability. The validation framework itself—CIPP dimensions operationalised through a Modified NGT with practitioner panels—can be applied to other values-based curricula, whether religious or secular, in other national contexts. And the module offers Islamic schools, which educate tens of millions of children worldwide, a template for moving from well-intentioned moral instruction to systematically validated pedagogy. The authors position the work as a model that can be adopted and adapted by educators and authorities seeking to deepen values-based learning in early education settings.

Limitations remain, as they do in any validation study. Expert consensus, however rigorous, is not the same as demonstrated impact on children. The panel confirmed that the module is relevant, well-structured, culturally apt, and usable—but the next scientific step is controlled implementation research measuring whether preschoolers taught with the ANa module actually show measurable gains in patience, honesty, compassion, diligence, and trustworthiness compared with peers in conventional programmes. Such outcome studies would close the loop between design validity and educational effectiveness.

Still, the study arrives at a moment when governments and educators worldwide are reconsidering the place of character formation in early schooling, amid concerns about children’s emotional wellbeing and social cohesion in digital-era childhoods. By demonstrating that a faith-rooted moral curriculum can be validated with the same methodological tools used for mainstream educational interventions, the Malaysian team has made a contribution that reaches past Islamic education alone. It signals that the science of moral education—its models, its consensus methods, and its evaluation frameworks—matures precisely when it learns to speak to the full diversity of the classrooms it serves. For the youngest learners, whose moral worlds are being built one story and one routine at a time, that maturation cannot come soon enough.