Variability of tasks in Czech lower-secondary school chemistry textbooks: trends and typical elaboration
Abstract
Textbooks represent the most concrete elaboration of curriculum students as well as teachers work with. One of the basic textbooks' role is to mediate the learning content.
However, textbooks are not supposed to be a mere subject-matter summary, but a functional aid supporting students in their specific field knowledge and skills' mastery. Effective learning is determined by students' own activity which is possible to be directed by learning tasks.
The nature of their elaboration in textbooks represents a textbook's potential to activate students. Frequent textbooks' use for lesson preparation only strengthens their impact on education.
The goal of this research was to find out which tasks are included in lower-secondary school chemistry textbooks. For this reason, tasks from the most frequently used four textbook sets were classified from their placement in textbooks and response type's point of view.
Targeted cognitive and knowledge dimensions were also analyses using the revised Bloom's taxonomy. Further, the main identified task types were qualitatively analysed with respect to the task structures and particular parts' elaboration.
The results showed predominating open-ended tasks focused on students' remembering or understanding factual or conceptual knowledge. The tasks mostly consists only of a stem, eventually associated with a short text or a teacher's experiment demonstration.
It is therefore possible to conclude textbooks offer support for basic chemistry knowledge acquisition, however higher-order thinking skills as well as the ability to use different representations' mastering is limited.