Analysis of content alignments between the new grade 7 general science textbook and the respective syllabus

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to check the alignment between the new grade seven general science textbook prepared by the Amhara National Regional State Education Bureau (ANRSEB) and the respective national syllabus. To this end, purposive sampling and quantitative research approaches were used to see the alignments of students learning outcomes (SLOs), contents, and levels of cognitive development between the syllabus and the textbook. In addition, the distribution of the level of cognitive development was also checked. Checklists and rubrics were used as data collecting tools. The findings revealed that 79.22% of the SLOs were perfectly aligned, 3.9% were partially aligned and 16.88% were not aligned. In terms of content alignments, 88.46% were aligned, 7.69% were partially aligned and 3.82% were not aligned. In relation to levels of cognitive development, the overall alignment index (P) was 0.914. Results related to the  distribution of level of cognitive development indicated that 89.47% were entertaining lower-order thinking and 10.53% were higher-order thinking. So, it is possible to conclude that the textbook has acceptable alignment with the respective syllabus, but it lacks perfect alignment. On this background, it is recommended that the textbook should be revised to make it perfectly aligned with the syllabus as well as to entertain higher-order thinking skills so that its users could satisfy the 21^st c. skills.