States of matter explanations in Slovenian textbooks for students aged 6 to 14

The basic aim of this study is to investigate the content of textual and pictorial material of
Slovenian science textbooks and notebooks on topic states of matter. The paper presents the
results of the analysis of educational material from two randomly selected publishers for
students aged 6 to 14 in the Slovenian primary and the lower secondary school. One topic
area (states of matter) was selected to be analysed. The first part of the analysis includes
exercise and images analysis according to the selected framework, and the second one
content analysis identifying key concepts and connections between them according to the
national curriculum recommendations. Results show quite a few similarities between the
analysed programmes (number of pages, type of items) but some differences could be
detected when comparing the type of images in the educational material. The content
analysis of the selected textbooks also shows that they retain the content directed by the
national curriculum, but the ways (examples, content of the images etc.) in which authors
present the topic differ.