Designing textbooks' general curriculum guide and desirable textbook's characteristics for the primary school level: A qualitative study

The purpose of this study was designing the textbooks' general curriculum guide and desirable textbook's characteristics for the primary school level. In this regard, based on a qualitative design, stages and components of textbook development and the desirable textbook's characteristics were explored through semi-structured interview. To ensure the validity and reliability of the study, two criteria of Lincoln and Guba were used. The research sample was selected using purposeful sampling method and the data were collected through interview with 17 curriculum experts and textbook developers of the Organization for Educational Research and Planning based on the theoretical saturation. The criteria for including the experts within the interview sample was having experience in the curriculum planning and textbook development. The data was analyzed through thematic analysis and to validate the qualitative data, the triangulation of the findings of the themes' network and the document analysis were used. The results showed that the general process of the primary school textbooks' development includes 8 stages of collecting, analyzing and extracting the implications, designing the textbook development, designing the development of the learning units, practical validation, textbook development, validation from the viewpoint of teachers and experts, and revising and textbook development. Also, the criteria and the characteristics of the desirable textbooks at the primary school level consist of adaptation with learning area curriculum, course highlights, structure, content, language, illustration, and paging and each of them has different components which have been presented in the detailed findings of the study.