Mapping the knowledge topography: a critical appraisal of geography textbook questions

Abstract

Textbook questions and exercises are quintessential part of every textbook. One can easily locate textbook questions at the end of the every chapter and also in between the texts. What are they meant for? Usually we think they are meant for assessing learners’ understanding regarding subject knowledge, providing clue to teacher to form other questions. However, besides these popular notions, textbook questions implicitly communicate messages about what is ‘worth’ knowledge and what learning is about? The present paper takes geography textbook questions as a unit of analysis and tries to analyze the nature of textbook questions with reference to content and cognitive processes perspective.

Keywords:

• textbook question
• learning
• geographical knowledge

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof. Bharati Baveja, my PhD supervisor and Prof. Namita Ranganathan, my mentor for guiding me in writing this paper. The paper has benefited from their invaluable inputs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.