Content Analysis of Textbooks

Abstract

The paper presents the results of the content analysis of the teaching text. We analyzed two text samples selected from textbooks - "Biology 1 for grammar schools" (textbook 2) and "Biology for the 2nd year of grammar schools and the 6th year of grammar schools with an eight-year study" (textbook 1). Both of these textbooks are used in teaching subject Biology in Slovakia. When analyzing both teaching texts, we tried to find out whether the texts, in terms of content complexity, are processed appropriately for the 1st grade students at the gymnasium. As part of the content analysis, we focused on syntactic difficulty (Ts) and conceptual difficulty (Tp) and overall difficulty (T), for which we used the T measure (the innovative Nestlerová – Průcha – Pluskal measure). This measure was modified for the analysis of not only Czech, but also Slovak textbooks. Based on this measure, we came to the conclusion that textbook 1 is processed more demandingly and its degree of difficulty reached the value of 55.28 compared to textbook 2, which degree of difficulty reached the value of 52.10. In addition to the statistical difficulty of the text of both textbooks, we tried to analyze the text in terms of the occupation of individual topics, the basic and supplementary text and the overall visual and graphic processing of the textbooks.