Values are normative frameworks that guide beliefs, choices, and social interactions. In school settings, values are not merely cognitive content; they are entwined with social cohesion, belonging, and civic dispositions. Recent work demonstrates that shared values among teachers and students covary with school climate, prosocial behavior, and indicators of wellbeing (Luo et al., 2023; Oeschger et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2022). As the relational features of school climate (trust, respect, inclusiveness) intersect with social–emotional competencies, values-based initiatives can strengthen empathy, cooperation, and citizenship tendencies (Kim and Park, 2024; Silke, 2024).

Early adolescence (ages 11–14) represents a developmentally sensitive window for the recognition and internalization of values. During this period, social cognition and executive control expand while peer influence intensifies; together, these forces rapidly shape value orientations and classroom behavior (Cheng, 2024). Longitudinal and comparative studies indicate that teachers’ value-related educational goals and the value-related school climate co-evolve, reinforcing what is modeled, rewarded, and normed in daily practice (Oeschger et al., 2024). These findings amplify the need for instruments that can validly assess values recognition at the middle-school level, in ways that are sensitive to context and development.

Two recent trends characterize measurement in this area. First, many studies still anchor to Schwartz’s theory of basic human values while adapting tasks to child and adolescent populations (e.g., recognition or prioritization of specific value content). Second, scale development now more consistently follows contemporary validity and reporting standards gathering evidence from test content and response processes to internal structure, relations to other variables, and the intended consequences of testing (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education, 2014; Brown and Zhao, 2023; Sireci, 2023). For new instruments, this implies reporting clear construct definitions, cognitive interviews for response-process evidence, exploratory/confirmatory factor analyses (EFA/CFA), internal consistency and stability estimates, measurement invariance across salient groups (e.g., sex, grade), and theoretically expected correlations with external criteria (e.g., school climate, prosocial behavior).

A methodological gap remains, however, for middle-school assessments that move beyond decontextualized Likert items and evaluate values recognition through situated, pictorial cues. Visual and pictorial tasks can make abstract values concrete, capture attention, and elicit faster, context-sensitive judgments of “which behavior exemplifies which value” in recognizable school scenarios. In educational research, visually supported assessments have been designed and validated for communicative and cognitive skills, demonstrating that digital/visual tasks can be psychometrically sound while improving engagement (Lo and Huang, 2024; Simon et al., 2022). Translating this approach to values recognition is promising precisely because many school-based values (e.g., fairness, responsibility, respect, helping) are enacted in everyday micro-interactions that can be depicted and then identified by students (Kayıran and Bağçeci, 2025; Emre et al., 2020).

The feasibility of pictorial approaches to values has historical precedent. The Picture-Based Value Survey for Children (PBVS-C) showed that visual materials can differentiate children’s value structures in developmentally appropriate ways (Döring et al., 2010). Yet most available pictorial tools focus on early childhood or global value preferences, not middle-school recognition of values embedded in social-school contexts. Meanwhile, adjacent literatures suggest that school climate is robustly linked to prosocial behavior and resilience during adolescence (Luo et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2022), implying that a recognition-focused pictorial assessment should relate to these constructs if it captures the intended domain.

Against this backdrop, the Pictorial Values Recognition Test (PVRT) is proposed to assess whether students in the middle-school years can correctly recognize values such as fairness, responsibility, respect, and helpfulness when presented with brief, realistic classroom and peer-interaction scenes. The development plan aligns with current standards for validity evidence (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education, 2014; Sireci, 2023): (a) Test content and response processes will be established through expert review and cognitive interviews to ensure scenario clarity, cultural relevance, and unidimensional item intent; (b) Internal structure will be examined via EFA/CFA; (c) Reliability will be estimated through internal consistency and, where feasible, test–retest; (d) Relations to other variables will be tested against theoretically proximal constructs (school climate, empathy/prosocial behavior); and (e) Measurement invariance will be evaluated across sex and grade to support fair group comparisons. Transparent reporting of these steps answers increasing expectations in high-impact journals for comprehensive validity arguments and replicable psychometric evidence (Brown and Zhao, 2023; Sireci, 2023).

The theoretical rationale for pictorial recognition rests on emerging accounts of moral-value perception: perceivers use learned schemas to extract value-relevant information from social scenes, rapidly matching cues (e.g., equitable turn-taking, rule-keeping) to corresponding value labels (Young, 2021). Well-designed pictorial stimuli can therefore function as structured elicitors of these schemas. Moreover, the school context provides rich, culturally resonant situations queueing in the cafeteria, group-work roles, sharing materials where values are commonly expressed and observed, increasing ecological validity. If the PVRT captures these judgments reliably, it can serve educators as a formative tool and provide policy makers with metrics for values-education efforts, complementing broader school-climate or SEL evaluations (Kim and Park, 2024; Silke, 2024).

The 10 core values defined by the Ministry of National Education (MONE) justice, friendship, honesty, self-discipline, patience, respect, love, responsibility, patriotism, and helpfulness constitute the foundational elements of students’ socio-emotional and moral development. The 12 values assessed in this study were not derived solely from MONE’s framework; rather, they were selected through an integrated process that considered both national curriculum priorities and universal value theories, particularly Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values. Following an extensive literature review and expert consultation, the values included in the PVRT were structured to align with developmentally meaningful expectations in the Turkish curriculum as well as well-established universal value dimensions such as universalism, benevolence, security, social order, self-regulation, and interpersonal harmony. Accordingly, values such as justice, responsibility, benevolence/helpfulness, patience, love, respect, friendship, honesty, self-discipline, patriotism, compassion, and tolerance represent a coherent framework that is both nationally grounded and theoretically global in scope. This alignment demonstrates that the PVRT reflects not only the priorities of the national curriculum but also a universally recognizable system for assessing value recognition.

Within Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values, benevolence encompasses motivational tendencies such as helping others, showing concern for the welfare of close others, and acting with a sense of interpersonal responsibility. These characteristics parallel MONE’s conceptualization of helpfulness, indicating a strong conceptual overlap between national and universal frameworks. Similarly, Schwartz’s dimensions of universalism, security, conformity, and tradition correspond to several of the values assessed in the PVRT such as justice, patriotism, responsibility, respect, and self-discipline. Thus, the PVRT does not aim merely to assess MONE’s core values; rather, it evaluates a value recognition ability that is conceptually compatible with the motivational domains identified in international value research.

The selection of the 12 values included in the PVRT followed a three-stage process: (1) an examination of MONE’s framework of 10 core values; (2) an analysis of their conceptual correspondences within universal value theories, particularly Schwartz’s model; and (3) a developmentally informed evaluation of which values could be meaningfully represented through culturally appropriate visual scenarios for middle school students. The resulting set of values thus represents a developmentally appropriate, culturally sensitive, and theoretically grounded framework that bridges national educational priorities with universal value theory.

In sum, recent literature (2021–2025) converges on three points. First, values, school climate, and social–emotional competencies are reciprocally influential in early adolescence (Cheng, 2024; Luo et al., 2023; Oeschger et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2022; Kayıran, 2023). Second, visual/pictorial assessment can be both developmentally appropriate and psychometrically defensible when built with careful construct definition and modern validation practices (Lo and Huang, 2024; Simon et al., 2022). Third, journals increasingly expect integrated validity arguments spanning content, process, structure, and consequences (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education, 2014; Brown and Zhao, 2023; Sireci, 2023). Addressing these points, the PVRT aims to fill a concrete gap by measuring values recognition through brief, school-realistic pictorial scenarios, thereby supporting classroom feedback loops and system-level program evaluation in values education.

The Pictorial Values Recognition Test (PVRT), developed within the scope of this study, conceptualizes value recognition not as an attitude or a personality trait but as a performance-based ability through which students correctly identify and match a value using visual cues. Accordingly, the PVRT is a Classical Test Theory (CTT)-based recognition test in which each item has a single correct answer. In such tests, construct validity is evaluated not through the identification of an underlying latent factor structure but through item-level indicators such as item difficulty, item discrimination, and internal consistency (KR-20). Therefore, the validity framework of the PVRT is grounded in content validity and CTT-based item statistics. This approach is widely accepted in the international literature on achievement and recognition testing.

The primary aim of this study is to present the development procedures, content validity evidence, and psychometric properties of the Pictorial Values Recognition Test (PVRT), which was designed to assess middle school students’ ability to recognize values through visual cues. The study contributes to the literature in two main ways: (1) It introduces an original measurement tool that evaluates values not through written attitude statements but through contextually and culturally adapted visual scenarios; and (2) it provides a developmentally appropriate, brief, practical, and visually based instrument that addresses the scarcity of assessment tools measuring value awareness at the middle-school level. In doing so, the PVRT enables a more experiential and context-sensitive evaluation of the outcomes of values education.

The findings from the Pictorial Values Recognition Test (PVRT) administered to middle school students provide valuable insights into students’ ability to recognize and internalize fundamental values within educational contexts. The results showed that the majority of students demonstrated moderate (64.3%) and high (32.7%) levels of value recognition. This distribution suggests that while students possess a foundational ability to identify various value concepts, certain values such as justice and compassion may be less well understood compared to others. This outcome aligns with previous research emphasizing that values education must employ effective strategies to strengthen the understanding and application of values in real-life contexts (Mansyur et al., 2021; Suyatno et al., 2019).

The comparatively lower recognition rates observed for abstract values such as justice and compassion are consistent with well-established findings in developmental psychology. Middle school students (ages 11–14) are in the transitional period toward Piaget’s formal operational stage, during which the ability to reason systematically about abstract moral principles becomes possible but is not yet fully consolidated (Piaget, 1972). As a result, students tend to more readily identify visual stimuli depicting concrete, observable behaviors, whereas they may struggle to derive the intended meaning from contextual cues that require abstraction, perspective-taking, or inferential reasoning. This developmental pattern is further supported by Kohlberg (1984) theory of moral development, which posits that individuals in this age group predominantly operate at the conventional level, where moral judgements rely on social norms, rule adherence, and authority approval rather than internally constructed moral principles. Consequently, pictorial scenarios intended to represent complex constructs such as distributive fairness for justice or affectively nuanced care for compassion may be interpreted inconsistently by students, reflecting normative developmental variability rather than a psychometric limitation of the PVRT. These findings highlight the importance of aligning visual value assessments with students’ cognitive and moral developmental profiles and underscore the need for continued refinement of visual stimuli representing abstract moral principles.

The 12 values included in the PVRT were not derived solely from the Ministry of National Education’s (MONE) framework of 10 core values; rather, they were identified through an integrative process that involved examining national curriculum priorities alongside international value theories. In Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values (1992), values such as helpfulness, responsibility, and compassion align closely with the motivational domains of benevolence and universalism, both of which emphasize prosocial concern and the protection of others’ welfare. Similarly, values such as justice and respect correspond to the universalism and conservation–social order dimensions, which include fairness, rule-based coordination, and interpersonal respect. Patriotism, while culturally contextual, aligns conceptually with Schwartz’s security, ingroup belonging, and collective identity value clusters (Schwartz et al., 2012). This broader theoretical grounding demonstrates that although the PVRT reflects national educational priorities, it simultaneously embodies value constructs that are recognizable and theoretically coherent within the universal value literature. Thus, the PVRT offers a dual-layered measurement structure both culturally situated and conceptually universal which enhances its interpretive strength and cross-cultural relevance.

The findings related to students’ recognition of the value of helpfulness can also be understood within the framework of Schwartz’s benevolence category, which encompasses motivations such as helping others, acting cooperatively, and promoting the welfare of close others (Schwartz, 1992; Schwartz et al., 2012). In this sense, the visual representation of helpfulness used in the PVRT corresponds not only to the national curriculum’s conceptualization of the value but also to its broader meaning in the universal value literature. This alignment underscores the conceptual robustness of the PVRT indicators and supports the theoretical grounding of the study’s interpretation of the helpfulness-related findings.

The relatively lower recognition scores for abstract values such as justice and compassion may partially reflect the inherent challenges associated with visually representing abstract moral constructs. Unlike concrete prosocial behaviors, abstract values often involve complex social judgments, relational subtleties, and inferred intentions elements that are difficult to fully capture within a single pictorial frame. These interpretive demands can result in greater variability in student responses, particularly in single-item assessments. Developmental research supports this interpretation: adolescents’ ability to reason about abstract moral principles develops gradually (Kohlberg, 1984; Wainryb and Turiel, 1994), and abstract concepts are less consistently recognized than concrete behaviors during early adolescence. For future work, the creation of visual item pools containing multiple exemplars for each abstract value followed by systematic piloting and selection of the strongest items would improve representational clarity and enhance the content validity of visual assessments targeting abstract moral constructs.

Verification of the test’s reliability through the KR-20 coefficient and item analysis underscores the potential of visual-based instruments in educational assessment. Such tools can make abstract concepts often challenging for students more accessible and cognitively meaningful. Integrating visual materials into pedagogical strategies not only aids recognition but also fosters deeper engagement with the content, consistent with the growing body of literature advocating integrated values education across subjects (Yaman and Anilan, 2021; Brady et al., 2011). The conscious use of interactive and visual pedagogical tools is crucial in enhancing students’ moral reasoning and their ability to internalize values (Thornberg and Oğuz, 2016).

Given the structural characteristics of the PVRT, each item functions as a performance-based recognition task with a single correct answer. Therefore, applying factor analysis which assumes an underlying latent construct measured by multiple continuous indicators is not appropriate for this type of instrument. Instead, validity was established through content validity procedures and Classical Test Theory (CTT) indices, including item difficulty, item discrimination, and internal consistency. This approach aligns with international measurement standards for recognition and achievement tests, where construct validity is evaluated through content representativeness and item-level psychometric performance rather than latent factor modeling.

Furthermore, the effectiveness of values education is significantly influenced by the sensitivity of the learning environment and teachers’ perspectives. Studies have shown that educators who explicitly model values in their instructional practices contribute markedly to students’ understanding and adoption of those values (Görgüt and Tutkun, 2018; Saputri and Marzuki, 2021). This reinforces the need for teacher education programs and curricula that prioritize values education across disciplines, moving beyond traditional moral or social studies courses (Solissa, 2022).

Evidence from various cultural contexts also supports the idea that systematic value clarification initiatives are integral to holistic human development. Across educational paradigms, a shared goal emerges: to nurture character formation and prepare students as responsible, ethically grounded citizens. Accordingly, developing a visual-based recognition framework serves as both a theoretical and practical approach to fostering students’ sense of social responsibility and community engagement (Schuelka and Sherab, 2022; Siswati et al., 2022).

For educational policymakers and practitioners, these findings highlight the necessity of designing instructional strategies that combine comprehensive discussions on values with visual stimuli and contextual learning. This approach ensures that students not only recognize but also deeply internalize essential moral and civic principles. The integration of visual tools with abstract moral instruction presents a promising pathway for cultivating ethically conscious and socially responsive individuals capable of navigating complex moral landscapes with clarity (Paleeri, 2017).

In conclusion, the present study reinforces the growing role of visual-based recognition tools in values education and advocates for the continuous refinement of instructional methodologies. Such an emphasis can ultimately enhance students’ understanding of values and contribute to the development of well-rounded individuals prepared for the dynamic demands of modern society.

The use of a single pictorial item to represent each value in the PVRT offers practical advantages in terms of administration time and cognitive load; however, it also introduces certain psychometric limitations. Students may conceptually understand a value yet interpret the behavior depicted in a single visual scenario in different ways, leading to variability unrelated to the construct being measured. For this reason, future research should consider developing a larger item pool with multiple visual representations for each value, followed by systematic piloting and item refinement. Such an approach would enhance representational breadth and improve the instrument’s overall construct coverage.

An examination of recognition rates revealed that patriotism yielded one of the highest levels of correct identification, whereas helpfulness was recognized at a markedly lower rate compared to other values. Given the prominent role of helpfulness in Turkish cultural norms related to social cohesion and communal support, this finding is particularly noteworthy. The lower recognition of this value may be linked to the visual stimulus itself, suggesting that the depicted behavior may not have been sufficiently clear or distinctive for students. Misinterpretation is especially likely in single-item assessments where alternative behavioral cues cannot be triangulated across multiple scenarios. Therefore, refining the visual representation of helpfulness by designing a more explicit, contextually transparent, and unambiguously prosocial scenario is recommended for future iterations of the test.

The findings of the present study indicate that the PVRT has preliminary utility for assessing middle school students’ ability to recognize specific values through visual cues. However, the results should not be interpreted as evidence that the PVRT captures the entirety of students’ value development or fully represents all domains of value education. The findings reflect only the visual items used in this study and the characteristics of the specific sample. Factors such as the single-item structure, the variability in visual representations, and the later cognitive maturation of abstract moral concepts must be taken into consideration when interpreting the results. Accordingly, the PVRT should be regarded as an initial indicator of value recognition rather than a comprehensive measure. Future research incorporating multi-item visual pools, diverse samples, and iterative psychometric validation procedures would provide a stronger evidence base and further enhance the robustness of the instrument.

This study aimed to develop and implement the Pictorial Values Recognition Test (PVRT) to assess middle school students’ ability to recognize 12 values: justice, generosity, friendship, honesty, compassion, self-control, patience, respect, love, responsibility, patriotism, and helpfulness. Total scores on the test ranged from 0 to 12, with levels classified as low (0–4), moderate (5–8), and high (9–12).

The results revealed that most students (64.3%) demonstrated a moderate level of value recognition, 32.7% showed a high level, and only 3% performed at a low level. These findings indicate that while students can partially identify value concepts correctly, certain values may still be conceptually confusing. The KR-20 reliability coefficient, along with item difficulty and discrimination analyses, confirmed that the PVRT is a reliable and valid measurement instrument.

The validity of the PVRT was supported through Classical Test Theory–based item analyses and comprehensive content validity procedures. Unlike latent personality or attitudinal scales, where construct validity is typically established through factor-analytic methods, the structural validity of the PVRT was evaluated in terms of the degree to which each item consistently and accurately represents the targeted value. In recognition-based performance tests with single-correct-response items, validity is derived not from latent factor structures but from the clarity, representational accuracy, and psychometric performance of the individual items.

The findings also support the use of visual-based assessment tools as an effective means of concretizing abstract concepts such as values. Accordingly, the role of visual materials in value recognition and internalization processes is becoming increasingly important in educational contexts.