EVALUATION OF ECOLOGICAL CONTENTS IN SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS USING A SEMANTIC NETWORK

Although students can today easily use different source of information studying ecology, textbooks are still important instruments for teaching and learning processes in school. Consequently, it is important to evaluate the quality of textbook that in schools are used. Literature present some post use textbooks evaluation, a lot of them based on the stakeholders direct involvement. Those methods are expensive and with a high margin of subjectiveness. The Semantic Network Model (SNM) is a form to represent semantically the structured knowledge. In the last years, the SNM has been used to study the organization of different domain of knowledge. Aim of this work is a presentation of strong and weakness points of a new methods based on the construction of a SNM from textbooks. Using SNM it is possible to evaluate how ecological concepts are presented in textbooks, assessing the relationship between ecological concepts groups and the connection of them with other disciplines (interdisciplinarity). Nevertheless, the construction of the SNM is a quite complex process that needs to be improved.