Evaluation of Attention to Technology Literacy Level in General Education (grades 1-9)

In the last three decades, Technology education has been part of the curriculum in public education, with the aim of fostering technology literacy. Technology education or technology literacy is an educational program that assists people to have an understanding and ability in designing and using technology products and systems and assessing the appropriateness of technological actions. This research was conducted to analyze textbook contents with regard to technology literacy elements. The method was content analysis. The population included all textbooks in grades 1 to 9, and the sampling was purposeful in which 24 textbooks were selected and their content were analyzed by two teachers using 20 elements of technology literacy through separate coding. The data were first described in frequency tables and analyzed later. The findings showed that technology literacy elements of understanding the nature and effects of technology are presented insufficiently. Process skills development elements are presented to an acceptable extent but these processes were far from technological processes such as Designing and Troubleshooting which are technological in nature. Also, regarding technological fields, information technology was the dominant content including 3/4 of the content, and little was left to other fields. Therefore, in general, it can be concluded that the new national curriculum is potentially weak and insufficient to develop technology literacy in all its dimensions.