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Description
From the first grades of primary education, children encounter abstract and complex concepts, many of which cannot be adequately represented by traditional or conventionally formulated definitions. Consequently, younger learners may struggle with understanding abstract concepts like energy, community, or climate. Previous studies have shown that children’s ability to engage with scientific and abstract concepts is closely related to the form in which these concepts are presented, including sentence structure, vocabulary choice, and the type of context provided (Murray & Reuter, 2005; Gelman & Meyer, 2011). Research on concept acquisition further suggests that abstract concepts are acquired gradually and are initially grounded in emotionally relevant experiences and situations, particularly in early school years, age 6 to 9 (Caramelli, Setti & Maurizzi, 2004). Contemporary educational resources already reflect these findings, which is evident in different types of presentation of complex concepts in textbooks, particularly in the domain of science education, where the interdisciplinarity of concepts is more prominent than in other school subjects.
The aim of this study is to examine the types of definitions in Croatian primary school science textbooks, Grades 3 to 8, in order to analyze how key concepts are systematically presented to different age level learners. The data includes definitions and definitional explanations extracted from textbooks for the subjects Nature and Society (Grades 3 and 4), Nature (Grades 5 and 6), and Biology (Grades 7 and 8). The definitions analysed are part of a larger dataset of textbook definitions extracted for the purpose of creating an online, learner-oriented dictionary of scientific concepts for primary education. All textbooks have been officially approved and widely used in Croatian primary education. At the present stage, textbooks published by two major publishers, Školska knjiga and Alfa, are analysed. Textbooks published by a third approved publisher, Profil Klett, will be incorporated in the second stage of the study.
From each textbook, definitions or explanations of concepts highlighted in bold font were manually extracted. Currently, a total of 654 definitions and/or explanations have been independently annotated by two annotators trained in terminology management. The data has been annotated for a superordinate concept, if stated, salient concept characteristics, and conceptual relations. Inter-annotator agreement has not been measured yet, but a preliminary qualitative analysis based on 59 concepts, 45 definitions and 21 explanations (Ostroški Anić & Pavić, in press) showed an extremely high agreement of 97% in the annotation of superordinate concepts. A much lower agreement was found for identifying concept characteristics, 68%. The causes for lower agreement were identified to be avoided in further annotation process.
For this paper, definitions of the same concept were compared vertically across grade levels in order to identify differences in the type of definition (e.g., intensional, partitive, enumerative, descriptive, functional, etc.) and in concept characteristics (e.g., origin, composition, form, function, purpose, location, etc.). Qualitative analysis shows that concrete core science concepts like water and organism share rather a uniform approach to presenting the concepts in textbooks, resulting in widely accepted definitions, e.g. Water is a liquid without colour, taste, or smell – a variant of which was found in four out of six textbooks for Grades 3 and 4. All six textbooks refer to the states of water, either within the definition itself or in accompanying explanations. The process of enriching the conceptual knowledge is evident from a Grade 5 definition: Water is a good solvent for gases and mineral substances, whereas a Grade 7 explanation of water further expands the scope of concept characteristics by placing water within the context of human physiological processes.
Variation in definitional structures observed during the analysis shows clear vertical enrichment of concept-related information presented in definitions, which mostly follows the cognitive development primary school children. Discrepancies, however, do exist in some textbooks, where graphic information is the primary source of understanding, and it is not always matched with appropriate linguistic context. The results of this study will be used for developing a prototype of an online, learner-oriented science dictionary for primary school students, which will offer multiple definitions aligned to educational level and conceptual depth. A resource of this kind would support learners’ transition from experiential knowledge toward scientific conceptual network in line with similar approaches to knowledge description, e.g. the idea of flexible definitions (San Martín, 2022).