The Use of the High School 12th-Grade Geography Textbook by Students in Turkey

Abstract

Textbooks are one of the most used teaching materials for attaining educational goals in secondary education institutions. Textbooks still maintain their importance at the present time, when a lot of technological developments are taking place. It is important to evaluate textbooks, which also play an important part in geography education, from the perspective of students who have just completed their high school education. To this end, the purpose of this study is to determine to what extent the geography textbook is used by high school 12^th graders in their classes. The study employs the mixed research model. A Likert-type survey composed of ten questions and five variables was prepared by obtaining expert opinion. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the survey was found to be 0.761. At the end of the survey, an open-ended question was addressed to the students. The study was conducted on the newly enrolled first-grade students of four verbal departments of Namık Kemal University Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the 2018-2019 academic year. The data obtained from the student survey are presented in tables along with frequency and percentage values.

The students’ responses to the five-variable, ten-question Likert-type survey prepared by the researchers imply that students do not frequently use the geography textbook when they are in the 12^th grade, especially in the process of preparing for the university entrance exam.