Abstract:

Improving the effectiveness of the methodology of teaching the general physics course requires optimizing the physics textbook, and this involves determining the didactic complexity (DC) of its sections, paragraphs and comparing them. The purpose of the article is to develop a method for evaluating the DC of educational texts in physics of sufficiently large volumes, taking into account the complexity of the text and formula information, and to test it on one of the general physics textbooks for universities.

The proposed method for evaluating the DC of educational texts in physics is as follows: 1) for each sub-paragraph to create a file with 10 key terms, the knowledge of which is necessary for understanding the text and is an indicator of the educational material complete assimilation; 2) to collect all the selected keywords in one text file and rank them dividing them into several categories of complexity; 3) using a special program Slozhnost.pas, which accesses the dictionary Slovar.txt, to analyze the files with keywords and determine the total amount of information contained in the key concepts from various paragraphs, as well as their average information capacity; 4) for each paragraph to estimate the proportion of mathematical and other formulas in relation to the total text volume; 5) for each sub-paragraph to write out 5 key terms of maximum complexity used in mathematical formulas; 6) for each paragraph to create files containing the keywords included in the formulas; 7) to evaluate the complexity of each term and use the program Slozhnost.pas to determine the total amount of information in keywords and the information folding coefficient for each paragraph; 8) from different sections of the textbook, to randomly select sentences, to determine the average length of words and the average number of syllables in words, to find the complexity indicator of the sentences structure; 9) for each paragraph, to calculate the differential and integral DC for the text and formula information.

To assess the semantic complexity of terms, the method of paired comparisons is used taking into account the amount of words in their definitions, its degree of the term abstraction, its entry into the student's language world picture. It is proposed to divide all non-mathematical concepts into 6 categories and evaluate their semantic complexity on a scale of 1-2-4-8-16-32. The mathematical concepts complexity is estimated by counting words in their definitions.

As a result, the differential and integral DC of paragraphs and sections of the general physics course are determined. The most difficult sections are “Electrodynamics " and "Fundamentals of Atomic and Nuclear Physics". Electrodynamics has large integral complexity, this is due to the large volume and use of mathematical concepts with a high degree of abstraction. The distribution of paragraphs within the attribute space “text integral complexity – formula integral complexity” is analyzed. The assessment of the physics sections complexity allows us: 1) to identify the distribution patterns of educational information in the textbook; 2) to study the peculiarities of the formation of the physical world view in the students' minds; 3) to balance the teaching methodology and the requirements for students; 4) to correct the time of studying quite complex issues; 5) to reduce the differential complexity of the text, adding explanations that facilitate understanding.

Keywords:

Didactics, information, knowledge folding, semantics, complexity, educational text, physics.