Representation of Crises in Coursebooks of the Public Education System: A Study Based on Content Analysis

Abstract

how crises are represented in elementary and high school textbooks through content analysis method. In the first step, the basic concepts related to this topic, were extracted from Iranian and international scientific and legal documents deductively. Then, 68 extracted concepts were put into 12 categories and were sent to the field experts in the form of a questionnaire.The reliability coefficient of the questionnaire was computed.88 with Cronbach's Alpha. The extracted categorieswere again offered to some field experts and validated. Based on confirmed categories, the content of textbooks (28 titles) and teacher's guidebooks (12 titles) were analyzed. The results of analyzing the textbooks show that the main focus is first on the issue of crisisology and the consequences of crises, and second, on preventive actions which encompass%80 of the content. The remainder of the related content was concerned with other topics; the contribution of the content that focused on resiliency and recovery is less than other concepts.The comparison of the weights allocated by the experts and the weights gained from the textbooks analysis was made by Mann-Whitney U and Chi square tests; in both tests, a meaningful difference was observed.

Keywords

• crisis
• environmental hazards
• content analysis
• resilience
• recovery