The use and shortcomings of the history textbook : A quantitative survey with qualitative elements about teachers' attitudes regarding history textbooks in teaching

In this master thesis we aim to answer the question: “which are the most prominent attitudes thathistory teachers have towards history educational textbooks” and “what kind of teaching materials are history teachers using when they choose to relinquish the educational textbook”. There are quite a fewstudies regarding the content in educational textbooks however, studies aimed at exploringteachers’ views and attitudes towards these textbooks are few. In northern Europe we havethe luxury as teachers to have a say in what kind of teaching material and what sources weuse in our history teaching; in contrast, many other countries’ where the teaching materialare strictly monitored and the curriculum states exactly what should be taught. This may bewhy we almost exclusively have found studies regarding our subject within the Swedish historical community. However, none of these researchers have done any major survey with aquantified research method within this field of knowledge. That is where we aim to focusour research for this master thesis. Furthermore, what we have found through our researchis that teachers’ attitudes towards and usage of educational textbooks are far more diversethan prior research have shown. Within this thesis we also aim to widen the field ofknowledge regarding how teachers seek and collect teaching materials outside the educational textbooks. Based on a survey with answers from a total of 85 teachers we quantify which parts of thehistory textbooks these teachers find problematic in their everyday use regardless ofwhether it is about historical content or historical doing. We also investigate whether thereare differences in the answers based on professional years.