Comparative Study On Knowledge Structures And Mode Of Presentation Of Science Textbooks In Primary Schools

In September 2001, curriculum standard for middle school and primary school made by the Ministry of Education has already been implemented,which has been 15 years to date.Deepening second period curriculum reform of Shanghai, the applicability of science textbooks becomes mature. Various versions of science textooks occurred across the country;and we select Nature published by Shanghai Technological Education Publishing House(Shanghai Science and Education Edition for short) and Science published by Educational Science Publishing House(Beijing Science and Education Edition for short) to conduct the research. These two textbooks are respectively used in Shanghai and Beijing. The reason why we do a comparative research for two sets of textbooks is because textbooks research is a very important task,in addition, research on textbooks also help personal teaching practice and are important to promote the curriculum reform to a high place,to deepen educational reform,to improve learning efficiency.And the study of two sets of textbooks is still blank;doing this research restudy textbooks from a new angle and also present textbooks on different ways,which deserves finding and discovering.In this paper, we apply the literature research, content analysis, comparison analysis, statistical analysis method and case study to find differences and similarities between two sets of textbooks on Intellectual content of science and content presentation.This research not only does quantitative analysis using some date to explain question,but also does quality analysis on the richer scientific connotation.Finding the two set of textbooks’ samilarity and differences from many aspects,summarizing their characteristics,not only compilers but also frontline teachers,it also has reference significance to them.This paper is divided into six parts.Chapter 1 is introduction,which mainly consists of the origin and background of the research, aim and meaning of research, definition of concept and theoretical basis,object of research, research contents and research methods.Chapter 2 is the domestic and international literature review, comprehensively reviewing the domestic and international research on the related textbooks, textbooks comparsion and science teaching materials,and teasing out that knowledge structure and mode of presentation of textbooks is the important aspect to test the quality of the textbooks; many experts study further in this aspect,which can guide this research.Chapter 3 is the summary of textbooks and curriculum between two places,introducing the differences between the names of Science Curriculum,but its curriculum idea is generally in the same.Nature in Shanghai is from grade 1 to grade5,while Science in Beijing is from grade 3 to grade 6,and the corresponding curriculum standards are different,which partly exsists differences in teaching material writing.Chapter 4 is comparsion of two sets of textbooks from structure.The first step is making an analysis on the whole structure by context analysis to find that two set of textbooks are the structure of units→lessons,but they are different on ranges of use,themes of unit and settings of unit structure.The next step is to set about studying three sections: Life World,Material World,Earth and Universe from total amounts and grade distributions.We know that the section Material World of two sets of textbooks are the main;the section Earth and Universe is the least;the total amounts of sections of two sets of textbooks have some differences;the sections of grade distribution from horizontal analysis is the same,but from vertical analysis is different by using statistical and data analysis.Chapter 5 is comparsion between modes of presentation of textbooks.Comparing with the language of mode of presentation,we find that syntactical structures of two sets of textbooks are abundant; syntactical structures of two sets of textbooks of Shanghai Science and Education Edition is mainly second person,while Beijing Science and Education Edition is mainly first person; Comparing with the amount of language and text, the amount of language and text of Shanghai Science and Education Edition is less,but the amount of language and text of Beijing Science and Education Edition combines text and image.We make the conclusion that the amount of images of two textbooks by studying the mode of the image presentation;the length of image of Shanghai Science and Education Edition is long,while the length of image of Beijing Science and Education Edition is short;the settings of image of Shanghai Science and Education Edition introduce cartoon figures as fixed learning partners,but the settings of image of Beijing Science and Education Edition uses a large amount of concept maps and icons.Then, comparing with the settings of columns,we find the differences between two sets of textbooks, the settings of columns of Shanghai Science and Education Edition is clearer than that of Beijing Science and Education Edition,and the structures of columns and the settings of columns is more explicit.Chapter 6 is the enlightenment analysing and comparing two sets of textbooks.We wish that settings of Science at the beginning of primary school and knowledge of distribution in the section of textbooks may be more reasonable,the mode of presentation of science textbooks in primary school,in addition, science textbooks in primary school have more characteristics as “learning material”,the features and style of the textbook becomes sharper.