Textbooks and Teaching Materials in Rural Schools: A Systematic Review

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a research project whose main purpose is to analyse the concept of multigrade teaching resources and the teaching materials used by teachers in rural schools, in particular the role of textbooks. The use and dimensions of teaching materials are studied in order to promote inclusion and learning in multigrade classrooms with children of different ages mixed together. The present systematic review aims to identify and analyse all of the research papers published internationally on teaching resources in rural schools for the Web of Science and Scopus databases (from 1992 to 2021) and Google Scholar (between 2010 and February 2021). Due to the dearth of publications focused on the topic of study, the reviewed articles have broad inclusion and exclusion criteria. This gives relevance and an innovative character to the research, allowing us to objectify the state of the question on multigrade didactic materials and their relation to teaching-learning processes. From a total of 332 research papers in the field of rural multigrade teaching identified for further analysis, only papers that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria and passed all phases of the PRISMA flow diagram were used (N = 33). Some research publications contributed to identifying opportunities and needs, and to suggesting criteria to be taken into account for the selection and creation of materials to promote inclusion and active learning methodologies. The first results show the need to create one’s own materials that analyse the reality of these schools, as well as the need to personalise and adapt printed or digital textbooks and other teaching materials in order to involve the students actively in the learning process and to respond to the needs of rural students in multigrade classrooms.

Keywords

• multigrade classrooms
• rural school
• teaching material
• textbooks
• systematic review