Evaluation of Traditional Textbook

Title of Book: "Pendidikan Moral Form Five"

Author: Kala Devi A/P Arumugan..Chang Keng Ling...Napisah Muhammad

Publisher: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka...Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia


This assignment focuses on evaluation of traditional textbook in terms of organization, content and physical aspects. The textbooks are the methods of learning as well as references for the students. For this Instructional Technology's assignment, we evaluated a textbook entitled "Pendidikan Moral Form Five" which is stresses on virtues, ethnicities, religions and so on.The first main point focused on this evaluation of traditional textbook is organization. The textbook provides a useful table of content, glossary and index as an easier reference in learning process. While the glossary provides the meaning of difficult words and vocabulary to make the students more understand. The tables of contents of this textbook show a logical arrangement and development of subject because the textbook has designed uniform in appearance and content layout throughout the book as well as within each chapter in order to avoid confusion among the students.
Besides, it contains useful references and bibliographies that gave a lot of benefits. The authors used the other resources such as magazines and internet in order to help the students gain more additional and new knowledge. Unfortunately, the authors did not provide introductions and summaries in each chapter clearly and comprehensively. This textbook is not confusing because the numbers are stated in all pages in each chapter.Besides that, in this evaluation of traditional textbook stressed on the content as well. Its content basically consists of the combinations of local and national standards such as religions and ethnicities in Malaysia as well as accurate and up-to-date. The contents of this textbook are not perfect and should be supported by other textbooks because it has no enough explanation and the authors just gave some short stories, dialogues and charts as examples. It needs more elaboration so that the students become more understand of what each topic is talk about. Perhaps the students understand and clear about all topics because the language is appropriate for them and grammatically correct. Nevertheless it has certain difficult words but the glossary is provided at the end of last page as well as info columns in most every pages.
At the end of lesson, there are a lot of questions, activities and quizzes to test how high the level of students' comprehension. Despite this textbook is all about Pendidikan Moral or Moral Education, there is certain part linked to other subject areas in terms of history, accounting and so on. This textbook provides various of activity that engage students in active learning while appealing to a wide range of abilities such as searching information from the internet and quite interesting because students have to make visiting to historical places and orphanages and making drama or debating. Some of the subject in this textbook encouraged higher level thinking of students.Lastly, this textbook addressed about the physical aspects in terms of sizes and weight which is suitable for student who will use it as well as the font and style age. The binding, pages and cover of the textbook are endurable because it is easy to tear. The textbook is appeal to the students due to colorful pages and graphics but the pages layout uncluttered and imbalanced caused by the pages are bleak in colors which is probably make the students bored and sleepy.
The illustrations of textbook, tables, figures, graphs and charts are provided appropriate representations of age and sex but in certain parts, the graphics are too childish. There is some chapter talked about variety of ethnics and religious ritual in Malaysia. Last but not least, this textbook consists of relevant and functional illustrations, tables, graphs and charts for the students.