Session Information
27 SES 16 B, How Do Science Textbooks Inspire and Support Effective Pedagogies? Analytical Frame and Coding Categories for Lower Secondary Science Student Books.
Symposium
Contribution
What do we see as pedagogical text? The category of pedagogical text is widely interpreted in the literature. It is not only textbooks and workbooks, but background materials collected from the Internet and articles from newspapers are also subjects of the study. The latter ones are of growing relevance, but we must not forget that their content was not originally for educational purposes. The aim of analyzing pedagogical texts is to collect numerical data of various components of texts for analysis and evaluation purposes. Our primer aim is to measure those text attributes that have impact on the performance of students’ literacy and general learning performance. One of the objectives of this research has been to identify language characteristics of students’ books that most effectively support effective teaching and learning in science at the age of 10-14. Our resource of information was mainly German empirical literature and textbook analysis tradition as well as international publications in English. German tradition is highly evidence-based and builds on measurements. In addition to the literature review, we have studied measurable textual properties and processed them quantitatively and qualitatively. Based on the analysis framework we developed the following coding categories: level of words/expressions, level of sentences and level of larger units of text. Examples for subcategories are density of unknown words, the crowding of the sentences, or text structure supporting understanding. Regarding the level of words and sentences quantitative strategies and related to the level of units of text rather qualitative approach we used. In the next step, by taking the above into practice, we are going to carry out a language analysis of 4 science textbooks in spring 2018.
References
Deme, László (1971): Mondatszerkezeti sajátosságok gyakorisági vizsgálata (Magyar szövegek alapján). Budapest: Akadémia Kiadó. Geiling, U. (1987): Quantitative Ergebnisse der Untersuhung von verständnishemmenden Stellen in Lehrtexten. in Informationen zu Schulbuchfragen, Vol 56. pp. 56–59.
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