Environmental Education in Iranian school Curriculum,Acontent analyses of Social Studies and science textbooks

The present study has been carried out with the aim of content analysis (CA) of newly-prepared textbooks for social studies and science of the six th grade based on the three environment education grounds, i.e. ecology, environment, and human activity. It is of CA and descriptive nature. The statistical population was all the sixth grade textbooks pages and the statistical sample was equal to the statistical population. The Shannon Entropy Method has been employed for the CA. The analysis unit has been the textbook pages (texts, images, questions, and exercises). The components and indexes for the concept of Environment education based on the study literature and sources and their validity have been confirmed by environment and education authorities. The results show that the highest frequency in the content of these textbooks is allocated to ecology, human activities and environment, respectively. Furthermore, human activities and environment are more prominent in the science textbook rather than the social studies ones, although ecology is more obvious in the latter. In terms of informational load and importance in these textbooks, ecology, environment, and human activity were the main grounds for the environment education, respectively. In sum, in these textbooks the three aforementioned grounds have not been presented parallel to each other and some modifications to the content of these textbooks are required to make them more understandable for the Iranian students.