ASSESSMENT OF THE ROLE OF THE STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS OF THE NATURAL CYCLE TEXTBOOKS IN THE ORGANIZATION OF THEIR OWN EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITY BY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Abstract

The approaches to the assessment of school textbooks are examined, the existing practice of experimental examination of textbooks is analyzed, the need for involving students in the assessment of the quality of textbooks to increase the degree of objectivity of assessment is substantiated. The features of perception by high school students and their involvement in the organization of their own educational activities of the structural components of a modern school textbook from a group of natural objects are studied. The textbook is considered as the main means of educational activity; the effectiveness of using it by the student is determined by the qualities of the tool and the student’s personal attitude to the textbook as an instrument of his own learning. The study involved 146 students in grades 9, 10 and 11. Respondents defined their attitude to structural elements (teaching texts, figures, tables, graphs, diagrams, tasks of different types, terminology dictionaries) of eight school textbooks by answering a 24-item questionnaire designed to find out the grade (on a ten-point scale) of different aspects of the structural components of the textbooks that participated in the study. The results of the study allowed to determine the change in the attitude of students to the components of the textbook as the educational level increased: reducing the interest of educational texts and tasks while increasing the simplicity of their perception and almost constant level of their understanding, significantly reducing the role of practical work, educational projects, vocabulary in mastering content sustainable influence on the understanding of the texts of figures, tables, graphs and diagrams. The small influence of the factor “educational level” on the results of evaluating the declarative and procedural components of the textbook structure (less than 50%), the advantage of using Web resources for organizing the student’s own educational activity in the procedural direction at all educational levels is shown. The proposed methodology for assessing the structural components of textbooks by students is a continuation of our research towards the creation of an experimental methodology for assessing the quality of the school textbook.