Evaluation of Activities in Secondary School Level Turkish Workbooks According to Types of Memory and Revised Bloom's Taxonomy

This study analyzes the activities in the Turkish student workbooks in the framework of secondary school level Turkish courses based on the literature of "memory, information processing process, memory-learning relationship and the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy." It seeks to determine which activities are associated with which type of information in the parts of the long-term memory (semantic memory and episodic memory), and to identify the steps in the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy which these information are linked to. The study further presents the distribution of the activities in the books according to the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy. Based on the results, the inspection of the distribution of the activities in the books in terms of semantic and episodic information reveals that there are more activities for the semantic dimension in all grade levels. Most of the activities in the semantic dimension, which includes academic knowledge and skills, are intended for the lower-order thinking skills; in the episodic dimension, the highest number of the activities are designed at the level of create whilst the lowest number of the activities are intended for the level of analyze and evaluate in all grade levels. The inspection of the distribution of all the activities in the books according to the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy points to that there are less activities at the level of analyze, evaluate and create, which entail higher-order thinking skills, whilst there are more activities at the level of remember, understand and apply in all grade levels.