A Content Analysis of Grades 2-6 Hedyehayeh Aseman Textbooks to Assess their Consistency with Core Competencies of the National Curriculum

The purpose of the present study was to conduct a content analysis of the grades 2-6 Hedyehayeh Aseman textbooks in order to assess their consistency with core competencies of the national curriculum (reasoning, faith, science, practice, and ethics). The population of the study included grades 2-6 Hedyehayeh Aseman textbooks in academic year 2015-2016. A number of 1381 sentences of all such textbooks were content analyzed and Shannon entropy was used to calculate the frequency, information load, and significance coefficients. The results showed that the components of science, faith, reasoning, practice, and ethics had the frequency of 34.84, 20.2, 22.6, 14.85, and 7.53 percent, respectively. In these books, the highest significance coefficient was obtained for the component of practice (40%), while the lowest index was related to ethics (0.048). The frequency and significance of the ethical component was lower than expected. According to the national curriculum, an integrated approach should be adopted in the selection and organization of the content in the areas of science, practice and ethics so that the grounds for the attainment of knowledge of two basic competencies, i.e., reasoning and faith, are prepared. Due to the imbalanced distribution of some of the aforementioned five components in the content of the analyzed textbooks, it is suggested that more attention be paid to the elements with lowest significance and frequency.