environmental education in iranian school curriculum,acontent analyses of social studies and science textbooks

the present study has been carried out with the aim of content analysis (ca) of newly-preparedtextbooks for social studies and science of the sixth grade based on the three environment education grounds, i.e.ecology, environment, and human activity. it is of caand descriptive nature. the statistical population was all thesixth grade textbooks pages and the statistical sample was equal to the statistical population. the shannonentropy method has been employed for the ca. the analysis unit has been the textbook pages (texts, images,questions, and exercises). the components and indexes for the concept of environment education based on thestudy literature and sources and their validity have been confirmed by environment and education authorities.the results show that the highest frequency in the content of these textbooks is allocated to ecology, humanactivities and environment, respectively. furthermore, human activities and environment are more prominent inthe science textbook rather than the social studies ones, although ecology is more obvious in the latter. in termsof informational load and importance in these textbooks, ecology, environment, and human activitywere themaingrounds for the environment education, respectively. in sum, in these textbooks the three aforementioned groundshave not been presented parallel to each other and some modifications to the content of these textbooks arerequired to make them more understandable for the iranian students.