The textbook task as a genre

Abstract

Schools today face the challenge of preparing students to live, work, and prosper in a rapidly changing world. As a response to this global challenge, Norway has adopted a national curriculum focusing on the development of 21 st -century skills. In this study, we investigate if and how the tasks in science and language arts textbooks in upper-secondary school have changed after the curriculum reform. We conduct a content analysis of 5,067 tasks in science and language arts textbooks and compare them to tasks in textbooks published before the reform, which we analysed in two previous studies. The results show only a marginal change in tasks in each subject, indicating that the tasks do not present the students with sufficient opportunities to practice the competences highlighted in the new curriculum. As a possible explanation regarding why textbook tasks in Norway-as well as a number of other countries-appear to change so little over time, we advance the hypothesis that the formulation of tasks in textbooks is influenced and constrained by culturally specific genre norms. These norms may represent a challenge to curriculum implementation and school change, and it is therefore important to raise awareness of textbook tasks. KEYWORDSTextbook; task; genre; curriculum reform First, a person will acquire information -facts, concepts, principles, solutions -involved in the particular task that is accomplished. Second, a person will practice operations -memorizing, classifying, inferring, analyzing -used to obtain or produce the information demanded by the task. (p. 162) A major source of tasks for both classroom activities and homework is the textbook (Gracin, 2018;Johansson, 2006). A textbook typically contains hundreds of tasks, while for textbooks in some subjects, such as mathematics and science, the number of tasks can be greater than one thousand (Andersson-Bakken et al., 2020;Gracin, 2018).If tasks, as Doyle claims, are closely linked to both what students learn in a school subject and how the students learn while studying that subject, one could expect that when the curriculum changes, so will the textbook tasks. Previous research on textbook tasks, however, shows that the types of tasks commonly used in a particular school subject remain more or less the same decade after decade (Gracin, 2018;Limberg, 2016;W. Yang et al., 2019). Furthermore, the information that students can acquire and the operations they practice when working on commonly used textbook CONTACT Jonas Bakken,

Exploring the Integration of Engineering Design Practices in Tenth-Grade Chemistry Activities

“…It should be noted that inquiry skills are also not well-represented in the current science (Aldahmash et al, 2016). Analysis approaches for different science curricula have been made and revealed similar results (Ferreira and Morais, 2014;Elmas et al, 2020;Bakken and Andersson-Bakken, 2021;Ferreira and Saraiva, 2021;Vojíř and Rusek, 2022), mathematics (Aldahmash and Alamri, 2020) or chemistry textbooks (Aldahmash and Omar, 2021). Moreover, the inclusion of all inquiry skills was directed toward teacher-centered learning rather than student-centered learning, contrary to the NRC standards [National Research Council (NRC), 1996, 2000.…”

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“…However, the differences between the proportions of these groups of terms vary considerably, from 0.75 (Scientia) through 1.15 (Fortuna), 2.44 (Eduko) and 2.50 (SPN-SOSaSOU) to 3.12 (SPN-SS). This shows the different conception of the Scientia textbooks (translated textbook series) as opposed to the rest of the analysed books whose conception follows the established textbook style [24,46].…”

“…The latter is closely linked with textbook tasks [23,24] and the key textbook component -learning text. This field of textbook research focused on the terms used in textbooks [25], students' strategies when reading a book [26] or the use of eye-tracking to monitor these phenomena [27].…”

Of teachers and textbooks: lower secondary teachers' perceived importance and use of chemistry textbook components

“…The results, again, confirm a very similar conception for textbook task parameters. Bakken and Andersson-Bakken (2021) even speak of a certain genre that textbook tasks follow, which are open-ended questions mostly targeting facts, only simple contexts, no complex concepts (Ferreira and Saraiva, 2021) and a lack of opportunity to develop competences (Bakken and Andersson-Bakken, 2021).…”

“…Zupanc and Devetak, 2021) and tasks (e.g. Bakken and Andersson-Bakken, 2021;Vojı ´r ˇ, 2021) could be considered the most important research topics in this field. These components can have the greatest impact on education.…”