A structural and critical review of the textbook: Islamic Ethics: Principles and Concepts Based on descriptive and relational content analysis models

Abstract

A textbook has a set of characteristics that show its educational structure. Structurally, each lesson of a textbook should at least include goals, a pre-organizer, a text, a summary, a practice and resources for further study. A book that does not meet these standards desperately lowers the quality of education. Therefore, one of the main ways to evaluate the quality of textbooks is to review them critically in terms of structural indicators. Since Islamic Ethics is a general course for all the students of academic disciplines, we decided to critically review Islamic Ethic: Principles and Concepts that is one of the textbooks in this field. ‎This book was written by Dr. Mehdi Alizadeh and his colleagues in 2011. Among different methods of textbook critical review, the method of quantitative content analysis has been used in this paper. This kind of analysis includes seven models in both descriptive and relational domains that just five models among them were applicable in this study. The results show that this book, despite its relative superiority to other relevant books, has serious drawbacks in terms of structure. This book lacks important sections such as pre-organizer, summary, and resources for further reading. According to the descriptive content analysis, 89% of the goals and 36% of the exercises are nonstandard. According to relational content analysis, 92% of the goals are related to the content, but 35% of the goals are not related to the exercises.