Conducting Tourism Component-based Content Analysis on Social Studies Textbooks of Second-grade Elementary School

Considering the fact that tourism is regarded as an essential industry that provides many opportunities for the development of communities, introducing and teaching tourism and its components by the education establishment is a crucially important strategy that can help develop tourism in a country. On the other hand, elementary school education forms the basis of all instructions, requiring special attention to be paid at this phase. Therefore, considering the role and significance of curriculum in teaching tourism concepts, especially the necessity for the inclusion of such concepts in textbooks, this study sought to analyze the content of the social studies textbooks taught at second-grade elementary school, taking tourism’s componential elements into account. To this end, Shannon’s entropy model was used to analyze the textbooks’ content (texts, images, tasks), designating the page as the unit of analysis. Moreover, the study's statistical population comprised of three textbooks designed to be taught at the fourth, fifth, and sixth-grade elementary school level, out of which 406 pages were selected. The results indicated that 994 items had addressed the components of tourism education. It was also found that the highest attention had been paid to "environmental protection", with its information load and coefficient correlation being 0.9849 and 0.1319, respectively. Furthermore, the lowest attention was reported to have been paid to the component of "roads and means of travel transportation," with its information load and coefficient correlation being 0.5203 and 0.0731, respectively.