Abstrakt
Textbooks are the most specific elaboration of the curriculum. They represent the intended curriculum, which is intended to be encountered directly by students.
Research shows textbooks are also used by teachers to prepare their lessons (Sikorová, 2010). The effect of textbooks on education is therefore significant.
One of the main determinants of effective and meaningful learning is the students' activity. In this sense, tasks play a key role (Slavík et al., 2010).
Within science (chemistry) education one of the most important goals is the development of scientific thinking and literacy. These objectives cannot be achieved with the use of textbooks aimed only at the presentation of the subject-matter.
The aims of the research were to find out what tasks contain contemporary chemistry textbooks for lower-secondary education in Czechia. Samples of at least 100 tasks from four most frequently used textbooks sets were analysed based on: response type, intended cognitive processes and intended types of knowledge.
A revised Bloom taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) was used for this purpose. The results show that there are similar trends in the analysed textbooks.
The tasks are usually open-ended with prevail tasks with long answer. It seems there is a lack of variability in tasks in textbooks.
In all the textbooks dominate tasks requiring understanding factual and conceptual knowledge. A minimum of tasks aims at analysing, evaluating, or creating.