Метод оценки дидактической сложности школьных учебников по различным дисциплинам

Abstract

The article discusses the problem of evaluating the differential didactic complexity (DDC) of educational texts, which characterizes the difficulty of their perception and assimilation by pupil. It is shown that DDC is determined by: 1) the density of semantic information, depending on the abstraction degree of the terms used and their presence in the pupil’s thesaurus; 2) the complexity level of mathematical, chemical and other formulas; 3) the structural complexity of the text, depending on the average length of its constituent words and sentences. Multiplying the DDC of the text by its volume, you can find the integral didactic complexity of the text. For the evaluation of the textbook DDC expert selects one page fragments of text randomly, identifies the key concepts, “measures” their average information content, determines the share of formulas and their average complexity. In this case, the classification of concepts according to the abstraction degree is used, which takes into account the occurrence of a particular word in the thesaurus of a preschool, fifth-grader, ninth-grader and school graduate. The structural complexity of the text is also taken into account, depending on the average length of words and sentences. The analysis of textbooks for school graduates has shown that the most difficult disciplines to understand are biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics. As a result of evaluating computer science textbooks for 3rd, 5th, 9th and 11th grades it was found that their semantic information density and differential semantic complexity monotonically increase from 5.3 to 8.1 and from 5.7 to 10.4 respectively.