The Anatomy of DepEd-issued Filipino Textbooks: Mapping Out Knowledge and Cognitive Complexity

The Grade 6 Filipino curriculum and Filipino textbooks have inadequacies that prevent the exhaustive development of students’ knowledge and cognition. These problems are acknowledged in existing scholarship, but the analyses... [ view full abstract ]

The Grade 6 Filipino curriculum and Filipino textbooks have inadequacies that prevent the exhaustive development of students’ knowledge and cognition. These problems are acknowledged in existing scholarship, but the analyses require reinforcement in terms of concentration and depth. Most of the textbook analyses carried out in the Philippine context focus on English language texts. When these are used as bases for developing Filipino language instructional materials, the tendency is to measure the materials against English language standards. The current work addresses these problems by focusing on Filipino language textbooks, which have thus far received insufficient research attention. Given that Filipino is the dominant language of public school students, it presents greater potential for expanding their knowledge and serves as a lens through which we can view the extent of such knowledge.           

This study aspires to improve textbook-based Filipino instruction by way of probing into both the foundation (the curriculum) and the instrument (the Filipino textbook) of education. Achieving a compromise that reconciles the opposing circumstances of a mass education system and the requirement to comprehensively develop students’ thinking skills is also a motivation of this study. Grade 6 Filipino textbooks issued by the Department of Education (DepEd) of the Philippines were examined to bring to light the ways these instructional materials prevent the exhaustive development of students’ knowledge and cognitive skills. Cognitive complexity was defined by integrating the principles of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy, constructivism and metacognition. The objectives were extracted from the grade 6 Filipino curriculum, and the questions, tasks, and assessments were taken from the textbooks.  These were then plotted in a taxonomy table to estimate their alignment and determine the cognitive processes involved in the language lessons. The findings show that these textbooks promote rote learning and impede the development of students’ critical thinking skills. The results informed my conception of a Filipino textbook evaluation tool and a Filipino translation of cognitive verbs which can function as a guide in designing instructional materials that build higher-order thinking skills and adhere to a process-oriented approach.