Abstract

During the last two decades, Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory has been used to promote changes in the school curriculum and teaching procedures. Despite the wide dissemination of Gardner’s theory, research concerning the potential exploitation of the theory in physics teaching procedures and especially the analysis of physics textbooks. The purpose of this study is to analyze physics textbooks for the second grade in a high school in Greece (which concerns students 13 - 14 years old), according Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory (MI). For this purpose, 793 activities were detected and analyzed. The analysis of the activities was performed by using a framework of analysis, which consists of the eight types of intelligences according to MI theory. That analysis, which allowed the recording of the activities' distribution in the physics textbook, followed the rules of the MI theory. It was found that the verbal intelligence is present in every activity of the textbook. As for logical mathematical intelligence and spatial intelligence, they are usually present, however, the other types of intelligences are severely limited. The above results have implications both in the field of educational research as well as in the organization of teaching material.