How Geography Textbook Tasks Promote Comparison Competency—An International Analysis

Abstract

Comparison is an important competency for gaining and linking knowledge. It can be learned in geography classes to help students understand complex concepts and develop autonomous geographical thinking. However, we do not currently have any model to assess comparison as a competency in geography classes. In addition, little is known about how textbook tasks promote comparison competency. Therefore, in this study, a competency model for comparison in geography education was developed. It consists of four dimensions of comparison competency, which relate either to the mastering of comparison processes or to content-related elements of comparisons. Then, via a qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics, the competency model was used to assess which dimensions of comparison competency were featured in 981 tasks from 20 German, English and French textbooks. Results showed that comparison tasks largely failed to promote autonomous and argumentative comparison process planning. However, numerous tasks performed better on the content-related aspects of comparison. Thus, the competency model presented in this study is a valuable tool to assess and enhance comparison competency in geography education and to promote students’ autonomous geographical thinking.

Opportunities for Learning: Analysis of Czech Lower-Secondary Chemistry Textbook Tasks

“…Therefore, the nature of chemistry (NoS) emphasizes existing knowledge as fixed, while lacking the procedural aspect of the NoS and room for new (out-of-the-box thinking). Simon and Budke 63 in their textbook research reached similar conclusions. They identified stress on goals associated with content as opposed to tasks related to methodological aspects and competence development.…”

A Comprehensive Framework for Comparing Textbooks: Insights from the Literature and Experts

“…Due to the aforementioned reasons, comparing textbooks has gained vast research attention [15,[31][32][33]. However, to the best of our knowledge, most of the extant research has evaluated and compared textbooks in terms of limited indicators of structure [34], content [23,32,35], learning expectations, and/or language analysis [20,36].…”

“…For example, the framework built by Sullivan and Benke [38] intended to compare introductory financial accounting textbooks. Moreover, Simon and Budke [33] created a task analysis framework targeted to geography textbooks to understand how comparison competency could be enhanced. To summarize, limited established frameworks are suited for comparing textbooks of diverse subjects.…”

Understanding of Developing and Setting Tasks in Geography Lessons by German and Dutch Student Teachers

“…It is important that challenging tasks are also set in the classroom to enable students to deal with the subject matter in a creative way, although this is only partly the case in textbooks. Studies show that German and Dutch textbooks, for example, integrate very few argumentation tasks, challenging comparative tasks, and planning tasks [1,20,38,94,95]. The following questions are part of the observation form: "In which category (NL)/performance level (D) can the task be classified?…”