The examination of geographical concepts in elementary school life studies and social sciences coursebooks

Elementary school is a period when the basis of an individual's cognitive and mental infrastructure is formed. The education provided in this period prepares students for life and helps them to earn the qualifications for the upcoming educational periods. Elementary school students perceive the phenomena and events in life as a whole. Therefore, the students are forced to learn the topics within the scope of different disciplines separately. With the consolidation of different disciplines in accordance with the development levels of the students, multidisciplinary lessons such as life science, social sciences, and science are introduced. Social sciences and science are within the scope of these lessons. The geography discipline is located between the social sciences and science and functions as a bridge. Therefore, in elementary school, geography education is provided within the scope of life science, social sciences, and science. Education in geography provides skills, values, information, and concepts for students to understand themselves, their relationship with the world, and other people. The cause-and-effect connection between geographical events and phenomena cannot be established without completely understanding the concepts regarding the geography discipline. Thus, it can be noted that geographical concepts are an important part of geography education. This study aims to determine the geographical concepts in life science coursebooks for first, second, and third-grade students and in social science coursebooks for fourth-grade students and to create categories and subcategories. The document analysis review method was used in this study designed with the qualitative method. The documents of the study consist of the life science and fourth-grade social sciences course books used in Kırşehir in the 2020–2021 academic year. The results were obtained by analyzing the data with the document analysis method. According to the results of the study, a total of 477 geographical concepts were found in life science and fourth-grade social sciences course books. According to the number of geographical contents in the coursebooks, the books are ranked as fourth-grade social sciences coursebooks (188), second-grade life science student books (137), third-grade life science books (92) and first-grade life science books (60). There are more geographical concepts in the second-grade life science student's book than in the third-grade life science coursebook. It was determined that the number of geographical concepts is especially high in second-grade life science coursebooks and fourth-grade social sciences coursebooks. The geographical concepts found were divided into categories and sub-categories according to geographical fields. 272 of the 477 geographical concepts in life science and fourth-grade social sciences books are classified in the physical geography category. Two hundred and five of them are classified under human and economic geography. It is determined that physical geography concepts are more common in coursebooks. The geographical concepts in the category of physical geography are divided into seven subcategories as the shape and movements of the world, science of landforms (geomorphology), climatology, disasters geography, plant/soil geography, and map information (cartography), and water geography (hydrography). The topic of shape and movements of the world has more geographical concepts compared to other physical geography categories. The geographical concepts in the category of human and economic geography are divided into seven subcategories as population and settlement geography, agricultural geography, transport geography, tourism geography, industrial geography, energy geography and underground sources. Population and settlement geography, the subcategory of human and economic geography has the most geographical concepts when compared to all other subcategories.