An Investigation into the Components of Democracy in the Social Education Textbooks of the Elementary School

This study aimed to determine the extent to which democracy compo-nents are taken into consideration in the Social Education textbooks of the elementary school based on Dewey, Schou, Shariatmadari, Bashirieh and Akhavnkazemi’s viewpoints. For this purpose, first we identified ten components of democracy based on the above men-tioned scholars’ viewpoints. Then we considered the paragraphs, pic-tures and questions in each lesson as the units of analysis. The fre-quency of unites of analysis, either including the democracy compo-nents or not, was counted and analyzed through William Romey's In-dex of Student Engagement (ISE). In addition, using Chi square test, the frequency of distribution of democracy components in all the se-lected textbooks as well as the differences between the engagement coefficients (ratios) was obtained. The results revealed that with re-gard to the democracy components, the Social Education textbook of the third grade had a very weak performance (ISE=0.24), the fourth grade book had a good performance (ISE=1.6), and the fifth grade book had a high performance (ISE=2.23). The questions in Social Ed-ucation textbooks of all the grades showed very weak performance concerning the democracy components. In regard to pictures, only the fifth grade book had a semiactive performance (ISE=0.91). Moreover, the results of Chi square test showed that no significant difference ex-isted among the grades concerning the distribution of democracy 10 Academic Journal of Curriculum Research components. Finally, the distribution of the democracy components in the whole content of the books was significantly unbalanced.