Investigating the six currents of the STSE approach in the fifth-grade elementary school science textbook and the degree of their compliance with the objectives of the national curriculum under the Iranian Education Transformation Document

Vatanpour, Hamid Reza; Rashidi, Pardis

Investigating the six currents of the STSE approach in the fifth-grade elementary school science textbook and the degree of their compliance with the objectives of the national curriculum under the Iranian Education Transformation Document

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

¹ Assistant Professor, Department of Basic Sciences, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran

² Department of Educational Sciences - Faculty of Educational Sciences and Psychology - Ferdowsi University - Mashhad - Iran

Abstract

The aim of this research was to study the effect of science, technology, society and environment on students' perceptions using STSE approach in elementary school education. This approach has six currents. The results of the study indicate that existing topics in the Fifth Elementary Experimental Science Book are somewhat coincident with these currents. Design current 59.06 %, logical reasoning 25.14%, socio-ecojustice 5.84%, sociocultural 4.87%, and the lowest historical 0.58 % of the STSE approach currents in the Fifth Elementary Experimental Science. It was found that although this book receives an acceptable score in logical design and reasoning, it is far from other currents especially historical, value-oriented and cultural streams. Comparing the frequency of these currents with the performance of Experimental Sciences Book in the National Curriculum of Islamic Republic of Iran (2012) as a sub-system of the Fundamental Transformation of Educational System Document which must be considered as a roadmap for all the policies, the production of educational materials, composition of textbooks, supplementary textbooks, educational packages, and audio-visual and electronic media; it can be concluded that students do not achieve many of these goals by just studying the book. This study adopts a descriptive and quantitative content analysis based on the STSE approach which is carried out by quantifying the content, frequency and numerical indices of different content dimensions and the application of Chi-Square. The material of the present study consists of the Experimental Sciences Book of the Fifth Grade of the primary school.

Keywords