Evaluation of secondary school 5th and 6th grade- science textbooks in terms of specific criteria

The textbooks are one of the most important instructional materials used in the education. Textbooks, which are good resources for teachers, students and parents to access with ease to the information and syllabus of the courses, need to be improved and fixed imperfections every year. For this purpose, in this research, 5th and 6th grades 'sciences` textbooks which are taught in public schools in the 2014-2015 academic year are investigated in terms of `content, organization, reading level, learning approach, pictures, teaching assistants at the end of the topic, laboratory activities, indexes and appendixes and physical appearance of the textbook. It is expected that the research will contribute to the development of the textbooks. In this study, it was used in a mixed approach which qualitative and quantitative methods can be used together. The research group was formed using simple random sampling method and the opinions of the teachers who used these books in their classes were taken as basis. Textbook evaluation scale and semi-structured interview forms were used as data collection tools. It has been determined if the teachers` opinions have meaningful differences depending on variables such as gender, age, professional experience, education status and work region. The analysis of the numerical data was made with a statistical program and the qualitative data was formed with the themes and tables by using the similarities and differences. According to the findings obtained from the scale and the interviews, the teachers stated that the unit teaching assistants in the book are inadequate for both textbooks. The 5th grade- textbook had an average point of "3.10" and the 6th grade-textbook had an average point of "3.43". Also, it was detected that there was no meaningful difference for any variables in the scale according to the determined variables. As a result, both textbooks were found to be at the `sufficient qualification`. However, some advises have given such as textbooks should be updated every year and improvement studies should be carried out by the cooperation of commission-school-university. Keywords: Science, Textbook, Teacher Views