Textbooks play an integral role in every teaching and learning process and they are the most essential tools used to transmit knowledge, skills and values to the learners. The purpose of this study was to examine if there is any change in knowledge representation and cognitive demands in the old curriculum and new curriculum grade 12 Geography textbooks. The study was informed by Bernstein’s concept of knowledge structures. The data were chapters from four grade 12 Geography textbooks. It employs a quantitative document analysis and an adapted analytical tool from Green and Naidoo (2008) was used to analyse data. The findings show that all the four texts contain more formal knowledge and more geographical images and definitions rather than everyday knowledge. The study also shows a noticeable change in the new curriculum textbooks regarding the number of tasks and questions used as a form of assessment. The new texts have a number of tasks and more questions in each task given but they show a minimal change in terms of cognitive levels, since across all the sampled textbooks most questions require understanding of factual knowledge. There are only few questions that engage learners in the other higher cognitive levels of reasoning other than understanding. In the old curriculum texts there is more geographic content and subject specific images whereas in the new curriculum texts there is less content and more space is taken by assessment tasks and images. The study concludes that in terms of content knowledge there is no substantial change in the new textbooks. There is little integration in terms of knowledge within the subject, between geography and other subjects, and between subject knowledge and everyday knowledge. There is some change in the kinds of knowledge assessed in the tasks. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

Teaching and learning foreign languages has always been a source of debate. This research begins by tracing the evolution of teaching methods and approaches. It proceeds to describe how the teaching and learning of Standard Italian at the post-secondary level and in adult education in Montreal is affected by the multicultural nature of the community. The analysis of individual textbooks used in post-secondary and adult instruction in Montreal and the surrounding area follows. This study should provide an impetus for further investigation regarding the relationship between foreign language acquisition and the choice of textbooks for classroom use and it could provide solutions for some of the pedagogical problems arising from Montreal's linguistic plurality.

This research develops a new approach to the development of training inexperienced journalists in news writing using a web-based platform of instruction delivery. E-training is growing in the world as an instructional setting, and offers not only financial benefits, but also a range of specific advantages over the traditional classroom type of setting. Such advantages include the ability to personalise the content of training to the trainees' current competencies, to facilitate regular multi-faceted monitoring of the changes in these competencies and to combine learning with the immediate practising of what was learned. Two e-training tools have been created and validated in this research: the news text assessment system (NTA) - a comprehensive and effective online scoring rubric, i.e. a matrix describing different levels of competency in several dimensions of the assessed performance - to assess the quality of news writing; and a scoring e-textbook (SET), an asynchronous news writing training tool. The SET is built around the NTA as its core element and contains hundreds of self-learning modules including exercises, examples, instructional texts, and quizzes to be used in a non-linear fashion according to the specific needs of trainees. Both the exercises and the NTA are elements of corrective feedback, which in psychological literature has been shown to be most effective in changing the subsequent performance of trainees. The two tools help both the trainee and the instructor. They assist the instructor to identify and address journalists' weak and absent competencies in news writing and consistently upgrade the learning modules when needed. They help trainees to monitor their progress and to learn from their own mistakes in the short periods of spare time they have during their work or in other time they can spare for the training. To create the NTA, 53 top journalism experts, both practitioners and academics, used the prototype of the assessment rubric with 30 criteria of news writing to assess the quality of several supplied news stories. The results were then subjected to statistical analysis and the NTA rubric was created as a compromise between its comprehensiveness and user-friendliness. To evaluate the NTA and the SET, an experiment was conducted with journalists in one post-Communist country in the form of an action research project, where this researcher was also the instructor. The experiment consisted of four months of training and reflection on its results by both the journalists and the researcher. The results show improvement in news writing competencies to an internationally 'acceptable' news writing standard for most of the trainees. The suggested tools have been well received and the trainees appreciated the interactivity that was provided during the training.

The purpose of this study was to examine eight elementary school social studies textbooks using the method of content analysis to analyze the treatment of Indians in the books selected for the study. It was conceded at the outset that not all teaching about Indians is done in social studies programs and not all information about Indians is presented through textbooks. However, it was recognized that the textbook is the basic guide for many teachers and students, and often the single source for historical information presented in social studies courses in elementary school classrooms. For the purposes of content analysis of the textbooks the guidelines of Berelson for content analysis were used to develop the categories. The procedures developed by Dr. Hargopal Dhand of the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon were modified to suit the purpose of this study.Data Work Sheets and Data Summary Sheets were used to gather and record information concerning frequency of occurrence of paragraphs devoted to Indians in the textbooks, topical classification of the paragraphs, illustrative and decorative features of the textbooks, classification of Indians presented, tribes selected, major topics discussed and approval or disapproval of Indians presented. The data were tabulated in both numerical and percentage form.A pilot study and validation procedure were carried out with students and professors of the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan in order to validate the method.It was found that generally the books analyzed gave an incomplete historical picture of Indian-Canadians. It was also found that Indian themes received low priority in the number and quality of illustrative and decorative features in the books. Indians were presented in such a manner as to detract from an understanding of the diversity of Indian cultures, languages and personalities. Indians were presented in a manner that lends itself to the encouragement of broad generalizations concerning an extremely wide variety of people that are classified as Indians.It was also found that there was a lack of variation in the tribes presented; there was a failure to reflect the richness and variety of Indian cultures in Canada; there was a high degree of unfavourable or negative presentation of Indian characters. For the most part Indians just are not there except for the initial contact-with Europeans, the beginning of the fur trade and a brief re-emergence during the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. It was concluded that for the most part the textbooks analyzed will not contribute positively to helping Indian and non-Indian elementary school students in Saskatchewan know and understand the Indian dimension of Canadian history and culture.

There is an urgent necessity for good ESP textbooks. There are not too many around, and the few in existence appear very inadequate. Most of the time, ESL textbook writers feel that they should provide a basic framework and expect the classroom teacher to build lesson plans around it while adapting the material to suit the needs of a particular class. Writing a good textbook is a formidable and time consuming task. This creative project is a descrption of an ESP textbook. It sets out to provide a set of methodological guidelines and a number of teaching techniques to be used by the classroom teacher in dealing with a lesson. It discusses the four basic activities of language learning: listening, speaking, reading and writing and how to approach them as a way to stress oral and written communication in the target language. Communicative competence is taken to be the objective of language teaching: the preparation of speakers competent to communicate in the target language. Communicative competence includes not only the linguistic forms of a language, but also the knowledge of when, how and to whom it is appropriate to use these forms. With this premise in mind this work sets out to discuss how to teach dialogues, structural patterns, pronunciation, reading and writing, all basic components of a typical language lesson. To wrap up the project, a typical ESP lesson on Tourism is included. Its organization is consistent with the methodological guidelines discusses earlier, it uses the techniques discussed in the main body of the work and represents a sensible approach to language learning.

The purpose of this thesis was to analyze the rhetoric of the Creationist-evolutionist textbook controversy. In Chapter II, Leland Griffin's approach to the study of historical movements was used concomitantly with Thomas Kuhn's ideas concerning scientific revolution to explore the first research question: What changes have occurred in the persuasive success rate of the Creationists' textbook battle as it has moved from its stance of "the good versus the evil" toward the stance of the scientist, (including scientific methods of reasoning and observation)?Chapter III explored the second research question: Do the new persuasive tactics, the use of scientific vocabulary, grammar, and forms of argument, provide more effective persuasive persuasive methods than did the earlier approaches. This chapter examined the evolutionary content of secondary school biology textbooks, and in particular, estimated the impact of change in Creationist persuasive tactics used since 1968 upon the content and marketing of secondary biology textbooks. The textbook studies supported the contention that the bifurcated movement has been highly successful. Evolutionary coverage has decreased in biology textbooks since 1968 while biblical creation has seen a definite increase.Currently, however, the two Creationist fronts face a new challenge as their polar views have been observed together in recent legal battles. This polarity in approach has already proven detrimental to the Creationists in recent trials. Chapter IV discussed the implications of this bifurcation of the Creationist Movement. Further, the implications of the current rhetorical crisis were examined. It was recommended that research be continued examining the rhetorical strategies used by the Creationists since 1963. Also, further research in the area of textbook analysis was deemed necessary. / Department of Speech Communication

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

The objective of this study was to determine if trends were present in the longitudinal treatment of concepts of plate tectonics in introductory college-level physical geology textbooks. In addition, a method was designed to convey the structure of these concepts of plate tectonics by determining the location in the textbook where they occur.Eighteen textbooks were selected from the time period of 1975 through 2004. The total narrative area was determined by measuring the height and width of each column of text in each textbook. Individual concepts of plate tectonics were determined using the constant comparative method. Nine concepts were identified. The treatment of each concept was expressed as a concept's percentage of the textbook's total narrative area. The structure of plate tectonics in each textbook was determined by creating scatterplots and pie graphs of the location within the text and the area devoted to each concept. Furthermore, a measure of the structure of the textbook over the study period was determined by comparing the proportion of chapters containing concepts of plate tectonics with the publication date.A strong positive correlation (r=.638) was found between the treatment of the theory of plate tectonics and the publication date of the textbook. This correlation was significant to the 0.01 level. Two of the nine identified concepts of plate tectonics were also found to have significant correlations.Similarly, a strong positive correlation was found between the proportion of chapters containing concepts of plate tectonics and the publication date. Thus, concepts of plate tectonics are found in more chapters in textbooks published during the latter parts of the study period.A concern arising from this study is the treatment of the concept identified as "The evidence for and the development of plate tectonics." This is the only identified concept of plate tectonics that showed a marked decrease during the study period. Furthermore, this concept corresponds with other studies that found many of America's textbooks reporting the end results of science while omitting the nature of science. / Department of Geology

Det finns en problematik i övergången för svenska studenter mellan gymnasiet och högskolan. En faktor i den problematiken är att bevis och bevisföring hanteras på olika sätt på de olika utbildningsnivåerna. Dessutom är forskning kring hur läroböcker hanterar bevis och bevisföring begränsad. I denna studie undersöks två vanliga läroböcker på gymnasiet med avseende på bevis och bevisföring. Utifrån de i ämnesplanen befintliga ämnesområdena granskas teoriavsnitten i läroböckerna med fokus på bevis och bevisföring. Dessutom undersöks bevisföringsuppgifter med utgångspunkt i G. Stylianides (2009) ramverk. Resultaten visar att läroböckerna är inkonsekventa i sitt hanterande av bevis och att bevis ofta osynliggörs i teoriavsnitten. Ett annat resultat är att den matematiska strukturen är svår att följa. Läroböckerna innehåller 6,7 % respektive 13,7 % bevisföringsuppgifter och vi har funnit 19 olika typer av bevisföringsuppgifter varav två typer är väldigt dominerande. Vi argumenterar att didaktiskt värdefulla syften kan uppnås genom att synliggöra bevis bättre i läroböcker. / There exists a problem in Swedish students’ transition between high school and college. One factor of this problem stems from the fact that proofs and proving are handled in different ways at these different levels of education. In addition, research on how textbooks deal with proofs and proving is limited. This study examines proofs and proving in two common math textbooks intended for upper secondary high school students in Sweden. Based on the contents of the curriculum, the theoretical sections in the textbooks are examined with an added focus on proofs and proving. Also, the textbooks’ tasks are examined with the help of a modified framework based on G. Stylianides (2009) framework. The results show that the textbooks are inconsistent in their handling of proofs and that proofs are often made invisible in the theoretical sections. Another result is that the mathematical structure is difficult to follow. The textbooks contain 6.7% and 13.7% proving tasks respectively and we have found 19 different types of proving tasks among which two types are very dominant. We argue that didactically valuable objectives can be achieved by making proofs more visible in textbooks.

Often academic departments have little knowledge about the course content that is presented by similar departments at other universities. This study aims to investigate the economics curricula offered by South African universities in order to contribute to the quality and content of the economics courses. International best practices with regard to the structure and content of, as well as the logistics behind an economics curriculum are identified, and the economics curricula offered by South African universities are compared to these international best practices. This study is attempted through gathering of available open source information as well as conducting a survey study to determine the status quo situation with regard to various issues relating to the economics curricula offered at South African universities. In terms of the structure of an economics curriculum, a benchmark tree structure is drawn from international best practices. To compare the structure of the economics curricula offered by the South African universities included in this study to international best practices, a tree structure of each university's curriculum is drafted in the same format as the benchmark tree structure. These tree structures are used to determine how each university's curriculum complies to international best practices. The textbooks that are used in a course are thought to be an indication of the content of that course. Therefore, the textbooks that are used by the different universities in each course are indicated in this study. With regard to the logistical aspects of an economics curriculum, e.g. student/lecturer ratios, the actual situation at most universities differs substantially from international best practices. International best practices suggest class sizes of no more than 25 students. Student-lecturer ratios in economics courses offered by South African universities are far remote from this. / Thesis (M.Com. (International Commerce))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.