Nutritional Supplements in Biology and Science Textbooks of Intermediate Stage and the Extent of Teachers' Knowledge of them

Abstract

The current study aims to identify to what extent nutritional supplements are included in science and biology textbooks for the intermediate stage for the academic year 2018- 2019, in the first place, and the teachers' knowledge about them, in the second place. To achieve the first goal, the researchers adopted French taxonomy of peoples' high commission of health of nutritional supplements to build up the study tool. The list includes the ingredients of nutritional supplements (vitamins, hormones, chemical and minerals, amino acids and living organisms). The list of nutritional supplements in its initial version includes (55) items distributed on the five contents. The list is presented to arbitrators and specialists in curriculum, methods of teaching and nutrition. The final version of the list in consists of (55) item. After getting the tool validity and analysis reliability, science textbooks of intermediate stage (2018- 2019) are analyzed based on the prepared list. The analysis comprises (313) page, and the explicit and implicit ideas are adopted as a unit of registration and repetition is a unit of counting. The most important result is that science and biology textbooks of the intermediate stage have included the ingredients of nutritional supplements in comparison with the criterion-referenced ratio that the researchers adopted based on the experts' opinions, which is (10%). Biology textbook of the 1 stage (Human and his Health) gets the first rank in its inclusion of nutritional supplements while science textbook of the 1 stage gets the second position, and science textbook of the 2 stage does not include any ingredient of nutritional supplements. To achieve the second goal, the researchers have built up a scale that its contents are identified based on the analysis tool contents. To verify the face validity, the scale has been presented to several arbitrators in the field of nutrition and  methods of teaching science. The researchers used re-testing to verify the scale reliability and it is (0,86). The scale of (34) item is ready to apply on the sample distributed on five components: (vitamins, hormones, chemical and minerals, amino acids and living organisms). The scale is applied on the study sample of (30) male teachers and (30) female teachers who are selected randomly from the study population. In light of the results, the researchers recommend several recommendations as focusing on the ingredients of nutritional supplements in the textbooks of the 1, 2 and 3 stages through redistributing the chapters on the intermediate stage taking into consideration the balance of distributing nutrition concepts of all books. Also, the researchers introduce several suggestions as conducting similar study on other stages like primary and preparatory stages. Moreover, make a research to measure the level of biology teachers' and students' acquisition of the concept of nutritional supplements.