A Quantitative Comparative Study Of The Static Difficulty Of High School History Textbooks

Since the start of basic Education Reformation, there are more versions of history textbooks show up based on the curriculum standard of senior high school. It is a guarantee for education quality to pick a proper textbook. The diversity of textbook asks for a good estimate system in which course difficulty is a inevitable factor. High course difficulty index could hurt students'learning initiative while low course difficulty index is unable to reach the teaching objectives. Up to now, most study about history textbook is based on qualitative method which is not objective or operable enough. Therefore, a scientific estimate system towards history textbook difficulty index which uses quantitative method is necessary. On the one hand,it will provide high school teachers a useful way to judge text difficulty of their teaching material which will help them control purposely the teaching difficulties,processes and qualities. On the other hand,it gives textbook writing group a self-check tool to guarantee their book difficulty is proper for high school students.This study is based on course difficulty estimate model founded by Professor ShiNingzhong which has been extensive applied in many subjects. Combining the modification of other subjects and the characteristic of history, we create History Course Difficulty Estimate Model and use it to assess text difficulty of four versions of history textbook which is popular used among China nowadays. Through calculating duration, breadth and depth of same courses, we can get the course difficulty index of each version of history book which can be used to make a compare between them and with high school history textbook standard. There are nine compulsory modules in the standard of high school history textbook,from which this study will choose ancient Chinese history,modern Chinese history, ancient world history and modern world history as study object. We need to state that the course difficulty referred in this article only means the text difficulty, not include some factors during teaching process which could affect the curriculum difficulty value, like the teaching model,students study ability,the teaching environment.The main conclusion of this study is listed here:In term of course breadth,all editions of history textbook have higher breadth index than the high school history textbook standard, among which the edition of Yuelu Press is the highest. The breadth of the edition of Beijing Normal University Press is closest to the high school history textbook while the editions of Renmin Press and Renjiao Press are a little above the standard.In term of course depth,what the history textbook standard requires mostly is to "learn" or "know", which accounts for 80%, while the requirement of "understand" or "exploration"only accounts for "18%" and "2%". However, the result of this research shows that all editions of textbooks ask more than that, by requiring more "understand" of knowledge. The editions of Yuelu Press and Renmin Press have closed course depth with history textbook standard, whose requirements of "know and learn" occupies more than half. At the same time,their requirements of "exploration" are much more, which can occupy more than 10%, except Beijing Normal University Press version's 3%. The course depth index of Yuelu Press is the lowest which is most closed to the history textbook standard while the RenJiao Press has the highest index.In term of course difficulty, the difficulty index of all edition textbooks are all higher than history textbook standard. The edition of Renmin Press is closed to the standard most which means it is the easiest. In general, the edition Beijing Normal University Press has the highest difficulty index while the edition of Yuelu Press has similar difficulty to the edition of Renjiao Press, although the three editions have different difficulty in different theme.According to the conclusion above, we have some advice:Firstly, high school teachers can reschedule their course process based on students understanding ability, study environment and their teaching experience using the model we build here to estimate textbook difficulty. Also, they can make advantage of different editions of textbook to improve their teaching quality.Secondly, the textbook writing group can use this model to check or revise the difficulty of the textbook before they are used by students to guarantee the book has proper difficulty for students.