CONCEPT OF A TEXTBOOK ON PHYSICS

Abstract

In the article, the conceptual fundamentals of the Physics textbooks design for the secondary school (7th–9th grades) and for the future profession-oriented school (10th–11th grades) are covered. The main problem which is solved by us is the specifi cation of such concept of Physics textbook which would promote the implementation of the competence-based, personality-oriented and activity-based approaches and respond to the double matter of the school Physics course at the same time. In the other words, it is the defi nition of the priorities in the functions, the common and the different features of the structure and the methodological apparatus of the textbooks on Physics for the secondary school (7th–9th grades) and for the future profession-oriented school (10th–11th grades). We consider that such criteria are: 1) the correspondence to the pupils’ age opportunities and the development tasks; 2) the correspondence to the purpose and the tasks of the physics education content; 3) the interrelations between the general and the certain educational aims and tasks as well as the requirements to the education outcomes. Paying a special attention to the pupils’ age peculiarities we concretize the feasibility of the aims and tasks set in the standards and in the curriculum; select those academic material that determines its content, structure, and methodological apparatus of a textbook in accordance with the most signifi cant psychological growth of the corresponding age category. Textbook functions can be provisionally divided into invariant ones which do not change during the whole period of creating a textbook and variant that change under the impact of the social and cultural factors. For the secondary school, a textbook on Physics is a complex informational model which refl ects four elements of the pedagogical system, namely, education goals, education content, didactic processes, organizational teaching forms; it allows implementing them in practice. In the high profession-oriented school, the role of such complex model must be played by an educational series: the main course book-manual and the variative handbooks-appendixes that demonstrate the content in correspondence to the chosen education profile. Both for the secondary and the high schools, we defi ne the following invariant functions of an educational book: informational, transformational, systemizing, motivational, acquisition, and self-control, developmental, and upbringing ones. For the secondary school, the variative functions are the following: cognitive (cognition), communicative, prognostics (prediction), and modelling ones. For the high school, these are the self-education function, representative, integrative, compensational, coordinative, and regulatory ones (for the professional selfdetermination).