Journal of Educational Sciences > Volume 1, No. 1, 2, 1989

The Quality of Structures of Explanations in Saudi Arabian History Textbooks / Nadia A. Bakkar

The study considered a critical problem in the history curriculum in the Saudi Arabian middle or intermediate schools, i.e. the school serving students in grades seven to nine.
The problem of comprehension posed by the structure of text offers an important perspective for judging the quality of a textbook. Four aspects of text structures were used to evaluate Saudi. Arabian textbooks. The results of the evaluation revealed that texts do not provide adequate historical explanation according to the goal-plan-action outcome frame suggested by Armbruster and Anderson on 1984. Suggestions about some ways in which text explanations might be improved were offered.
Why many students are not proficient in !earning from content area textbooks is a question that has challenged many theorists and researchers over the past few years in the United States. Armbruster and Anderson began to suspect that textbooks themselves might be contributing to comprehension and learning problems [1, p,1]. This difficulty prompted them to begin an investigation of text in an effort to identify the aspects of text that seemed to impede learning