History in bosnia and herzegovina physics textbooks for primary school: Historical accuracy and cognitive adequacy

Abstract

Examples of inclusion of historical information and short stories in physics textbooks for primary school in Bosnia and Herzegovina are presented and commented upon. These textbooks are analyzed from two perspectives. The first one is the historical accuracy of the included episodes or, in other words, whether the description of the particular episode is consistent with known historical facts. The second more important one is the cognitive perspective: whether the presentation is structured in a cognitively adequate way, giving pupils an opportunity to learn about the nature and effectiveness of physics without inducing some erroneous ideas about omitted details. To illustrate this aspect, we report initial results of a pilot study in which primary school pupils were presented with drawings, thinking and reasoning tasks related to an incomplete and superficial textbook presentation of one important historical episode (the experiment carried out to determine the speed of sound in water). The results show that the pupils are able to detect missing information and propose their own ideas on how they think the experiment was carried out. As some of these ideas are erroneous, superficial textbook presentations of historical episodes are potentially misleading.