Facts about Nature in Some Textbooks for Subject Nature and Society for Fourth Grade of Elementary School in Republic of Serbia

Abstract

The term represents an integral element of each subject and forms the basis for the development of knowledge and mastery of knowledge acquired through the development of science. The school and the course book should enable students to adopt a system of scientific concepts from a certain field. This work deals with the analysis of the concepts of nature in the coursebooks of Nature and Society for the fourth grade of primary school, published by the publishers: Klett, New logos, and Bigz schooling. The research provides answers to the following questions: Are the concepts of nature explicitly represented in coursebooks? Do complete and incomplete logical definitions of the concepts of nature dominate in the coursebooks of Nature and Society? Is there a dominance of complete and incomplete logical definitions of different publishers and by the dominance of complete and incomplete logical definitions of the concepts of nature? Based on the results of research on the definitions of the concepts of nature in the coursebooks of Nature and Society for the fourth grade, it can be concluded that the coursebooks of Klett, New logos, and Bigz schooling have a very large number of undefined concepts of nature, greater than the number of definitions. Most textbooks about nature are in the textbook published by Klett (198 terms), followed by the textbook published by New Logos (174 terms), while the least notions about nature are found in the textbook published by Bigz schooling (142 terms). The most accurate definitions are in the textbook published by Klett (86 definitions), followed by the textbook published by New Logos (83 definitions), while the least definitions of nature are found in the textbook Bigz schooling (59 definitions). All of this points to the need for detailed changes to the analyzed nature and society textbooks from the publishing houses Klett, New logos, and Bigz schooling. This problem will certainly be the subject of academic discussion and some future research.