Visuals in geography textbooks: Increasing reliability of the assessment tool
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The pupils’ acquisition of knowledge during school instruction is nowadays strongly influenced by the expansion of visual media (Moser, 2010). In this context, contemporary textbook production is undergoing a visual turn (LaSpina, 1998). Although the amount of visuals in textbooks grows at the expense of text, there is a lack of serious and research-based considerations of their assessment. The aim of the paper is to describe the process of development of a research instrument for (a) the categorization of types and (b) the assessment of particular instructional qualities of visuals in geography textbooks (see Janko, 2012). The category system is based on deductive content analysis (see Gläser-Zikuda, 2008, p. 72). Theoretical background underpinning the research instrument is presented, especially the Dual Coding Theory (e.g. Paivio, 2007). Then, particular phases of development of the category system are described and discussed: (1) The phase of identification of the theoretically sound criteria for the assessment of types and instructional qualities of visuals in textbooks (which were consequently transformed into categories); (2) the phase of categories’ research operationalization, which comprised several consequential steps; (3) and the phase of the verification of the category system in the terms of reliability. Gained values of the Cohen's Kappa and direct matching, which indicate satisfactory degrees of inter-rater reliability, are considered. The authors describe and critically reflect on particular methodological difficulties that emerged during the de-velopment and validation of the category system. At the end of the paper methodological advan-tages and limits of the method as well as its informative value are critically reflected. |
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