Abstract
The main objective of this article is to analyze the cognitive level of the activities in History textbooks in Spain, England, and Portugal in the transition stage from Primary to Secondary Education (11–13 years), according to the country of origin, typology, and the concepts and disciplinary contents included. The design of this research is quantitative, descriptive, and cross-sectional. The non-probabilistic sample consists of 6,561 activities contained in 27 school textbooks from Spain, England, and Portugal. Descriptive and contrast analyses have been carried out using parametric tests. The results indicate that textbooks from Spain and Portugal mainly include activities situated between a basic and intermediate cognitive level while in England, the cognitive level of activities is medium or high. The ANOVA and Tukey B tests show significant differences between the cognitive level required in the activities and the typology of exercises, the concepts, and historical contents worked on. The activities with higher cognitive level correspond to those of creation and essays, the exercises that work on empathy and historical relevance, and that contain activities of social and economic history. In contrast, the activities with the lowest cognitive level are short questions and objective tests, those that work on first-order concepts (data and concrete facts), and those on the History of Art. The conclusion is that there is a need for a balanced presence of first-order content and historical thinking skills, the application in the classroom of a more active student-centered methodology, and the teachers’ conception of history teaching that prioritizes historical skills.
Highlights
The textbook is a cultural, academic, commercial, and ideological product
Textbooks for the Spanish curriculum, which is mainly regressive in nature, contain an extension of the curriculum contents so that these reach the classroom with almost no History Education, Textbooks, Cognitive Skills modification-an issue that deserves more attention than it currently receives
Due to the paucity of studies on educational competences developed from the activities contained in History textbooks in these countries, this study has focused on the cognitive level of these exercises
Summary
The textbook is a cultural, academic, commercial, and ideological product. The purpose of textbooks has always been to bring together the set of fundamental truths that every student must know well and believe; facts, knowledge, and beliefs that are established as closed, immutable, and unquestionable (Viñao, 2003). Carbone (2003) considers that school books are cultural works with their own identity, which must be analyzed from a multidisciplinary point of view. In his essay entitled “La historia o la lectura del tiempo,” Chartier (2007) analyzes the debates on History as a narrative story since the 1970s He highlights works such as that of Certeau (1975), which emphasized the discursive nature of History and how this debate shook the foundations of History as a discipline. The textbook is probably the historical narrative most read by society as a whole, and perhaps, the only history narrative people use throughout their lives, along with other informal means of knowledge (mass media, museums, other centers of historical interest, etc.) This is why it is so important to analyze this story, this narrative, which has created so much controversy through its use (and abuse) in education (Foster and Crawford, 2006)
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