The Content Analysis of the Elementary Science Textbooks in the 6th National Curriculum

제 6차 교육과정에 의한 초등학교 자연 교과서의 내용 분석

This study was intended to suggest the desirable direction in the 7th national curriculum revision through the analysis of the elementary science textbooks in the 6th national curriculum. The analysis system was composed of three categories, (1)knowledge (2)inquiry process and (3)attitude. And knowledge was divided into fact, concept and rule. And inquiry process was divided into thirteen subcategories such as manipulating experimental apparatus, observing, measuring, recording data, classifying, interpreting/ predicting, determining relationship/ causal explanation, extrapolating/ interpolating, drawing conclusions/ formulating a generalization or model, evaluating, formulating a problem, generating a hypothesis and designing an experiment/ controlling variables. Each sentence in the textbooks was considered as an analyzing unit. The frequency and percentage of each category were counted and the ratios were calculated. The findings could be summarized as follows: 1. The content of the elementary science textbooks was composed of knowledge 10.3%, inquiry process 88.8%, attitude 0.8% respectively. 2. As increasing the grades, the ratio of knowledge showed high frequency, but that of attitude showed low frequency. 3. In All the grades, the ratio of observing was the highest in inquiry process. 4. In the domain of physics and chemistry, the manipulating experimental apparatus showed high frequency. In the domain of biology and earth science, the role of observing was emphasized.