Shahram Ranjdoost, Zahra Khandani, Mohammad Azimi, Morteza Golshani Gehraz,
Volume 23, Issue 1 (6-2025)
Abstract
Background and Aim: The present study aims to qualitatively analyze the content of lower secondary school science textbooks in terms of the reflection of health education concepts and assumptions, with the goal of improving students’ comprehensive health development and quality of life through the prevention of social harms.
Materials and Methods: This study employed a qualitative and descriptive content analysis using a deductive approach. The units of analysis included pages (texts, questions, exercises, and illustrations). The statistical population consisted of all lower secondary school science textbooks used in the 2017–2018 academic year. Purposeful sampling was applied, and all three textbooks were selected for analysis. A content analysis checklist was used as the research instrument. To ensure validity, face validity, content validity, and expert opinions were applied, while reliability was confirmed using the retest technique, yielding a correlation coefficient of 0.89.
Results: A total of 698 instances of health education components were identified across the three textbooks. The most frequent component was “familiarity with body functions and organs” with 344 occurrences. In contrast, components such as “assertiveness and self-confidence”, “healthy communication with others”, “empathy and compassion”, “awareness of diseases such as AIDS”, “drug abuse”, and “consultation in life” were entirely absent from the analyzed content.
Conclusion: The findings indicated that health education components are distributed unevenly across the science textbooks of lower secondary education. Some components were underrepresented or completely missing. Therefore, educational policymakers and textbook authors should pay greater attention to the balanced and comprehensive inclusion of health education elements in lower secondary science curricula.
