Role of social science's curricula in developing citizenship skills

With regard to the fundamental effect of traing and education in the students’ sociablity, preparing the young generation to play citizenship role in the local, national and global community is an issue which is expected of this educational entity. The present study was conducted to evaluate the effect of the content of social sciences textbooks in line with the determined objectives and the degree of presenting the citizenship training skills in such textbooks. This content analysis study was conducted in social sciences textbooks of middle school courses in 2010-11. Based on sectioning or cutting procedure, social sciences textbooks’ contents of secondary school was categorized and divided into four sections including text, image, question and activity. Shannon entropy method was used for data analysis. After normalizing the data, information load of each category was calculated and finally, importance coefficience of each one of categories was estimated using categories’ information load. From among the 3149 units calculated in the content of the secondary school’s social sciences textbooks, just 99 units were allocated to the special citizenship skill. The highest rate of attention belonged to the Self-awareness with 31 units. No reference was made to “appropriate use of civil facilities”. Although formal curricula, especially social sciences play substantial role in the realization of citizenship training, little attention has been paid to the indexes pertinent to citizenship skills in the social sciences curricula content.