Abstract:

The aim of this study was to analyze the questions included in the Turkish middle school science textbooks in terms of content domains, cognitive domains, and item types as stated in the TIMSS 2011 science framework. Towards this aim, current study utilized content analysis method in which the science questions in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade textbooks were examined. The results of the study indicated that most of the textbook science questions assessed students’ cognitive ability of “knowing” while only a few of them (about 3 percent) required students to use high level cognitive skills (reasoning in our case). Moreover, physics content domain represented more than half of the textbook science items while earth sciences covered only a small percentage (about 10%) in the middle school textbooks. In addition, most of the science questions were offered in the form of multiple-choice while a small proportion of them were open-ended questions.