Количественная оценка сложности изучения электрического и магнитного полей в различных учебниках физики

Abstract

Improvement of textbooks and manuals assumes the creation and development of quantitative estimation methods of didactic characteristics of these or those learning material elements. Not small interest is represented by the determination problem of didactic complexity of the educational texts on electrodynamics connected with introduction of the concepts "electric field" and "magnetic field". The research aim is to develop an objective method of quantitative complexity assessment of the physics course issues and the use of this method to determine the complexity of the study of electric and magnetic fields in various textbooks on physics for schools and universities. At this the educational text is considered as a set of sentences, each of which carries a certain idea and consists of “ordinary” words and scientific terms. It is supposed that the sentence complexity is the sum of the complexity of understanding each words (terms). The term complexity can be characterized by the folding coefficient which equal to the number of words in the corresponding concept explanation. To find the text complexity it is necessary to multiply the folding coefficient by the average quantity of words in the sentence. We applied the special computer program which analyzed the file and counted number of the each term uses and summarized their complexities. Thus it addressed to the dictionary-thesaurus, — special file containing a list of terms and folding coefficients corresponding to them. To assess the complexity of the formulas included in the educational text, they are replaced by verbal descriptions, and the resulting file is also analyzed using the computer program. Results of the content analysis of seven paragraphs from various physics textbooks for school and higher education institution are presented in article. They allow us to claim that the developed methodology of the folding coefficient assessment for educational information and complexity of the text is effective and gives the correct results.