The Ethiopian Grade 9 Physics Textbooks: Do They Promote Or Inhibit Students’ Creative Thinking?

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate whether Ethiopian grade 9 physics textbooks promote or inhibit creative thinking of students. To realize that, the activities of the first four units in text books have been investigated through document and questionnaire analysis. In the questionnaire analysis, 10 physics teachers and 30 students from secondary school were selected for respondents using a purposely sampling technique in Mida kegn woreda. So, a qualitative and quantitative research method was used in the research. From the document analysis, it is found that out of 170 activities, 110(64.7%) were close ended questions and 60(35.3%) were open ended questions. This indicates that only 35.3% of activities were encouraging divergent thinking. When these open ended questions were identified again in to four categories of divergent thinking, more weights were given to the fluency of thought 26(15.3%) from four core components and no weight was given to novelty of thought. In addition to document analysis, the analysis of questionnaires from teachers’ response shows that, in average, 72.5% of the respondents said that weight given to the four core components of divergent thinking was low. Similarly, the analysis of questionnaires from students’ response indicates that, in average, 64% of the respondents said that the opportunity given to the four core components of divergent thinking was also low. Based on the result of the study, the following Conclusion could be deduced: The result obtained from document, questionnaire analysis from both teachers’ and students’ responses show that the activities in the textbooks that encourage divergent thinking were low. Therefore, according to the criteria (fluency, flexibility, novelty and elaboration) we used to investigate the activities in the first four units of the textbooks, the activities in the textbooks do not encourage the divergent thinking so that the Ethiopian Grade 9 physics textbooks do not promote the creative thinking of the students