Abstract:

This paper represents one of the outputs of the VEGA project No. 1/0486/24, entitled "Research on Teachers' Potential and Analysis of Curricular Documents from the Perspective of Content Integration in Primary Education." The project is led by PaedDr. Monika Brozmanová, PhD. In this paper, the authors analyse the complementarity of tasks in achieving the goals of natural science and social studies education in the teaching of social studies and natural science subjects. The analysis focuses on the integration and identification of intersections between natural science and social studies education in instructional tasks selected from third-grade social studies and natural science textbooks. The instructional task assignments from the most frequently used textbooks in the teaching process of natural science and social studies were subjected to content analysis. A comparative analysis of the natural science textbooks revealed that all of them include tasks that facilitate the integration of natural science and social studies content. A total of 156 tasks, either explicitly or implicitly, were identified as providing an opportunity for mutual integration, representing 19,4% of the 807 tasks analysed. The highest proportion of tasks is found in the textbook by Rochovská, I., and Zvončeková, V. (27,4%). The largest number of instructional tasks is found in the textbook and workbook by Expol Pedagogika, authored by Krížová, J., and Gašparová, M. (2022), among the third-grade social studies textbooks. A total of 1,238 instructional tasks were identified across both educational publications, of which 235 (19%) were found to be explicitly or implicitly mutually complementary. Of these, the textbook contains 752 tasks, 155 of which have the potential for integration with natural science (20,6%), while the workbook contains 485 tasks, 80 of which have the potential for examination (16,5%). The present paper provides a more detailed account of the statistical parameters, the nature of the mutual intersections, and specific examples of integration.

Keywords:

Quality of Education, Integration, Textbooks, Instructional tasks, Natural Science, Social studies.