AUTOMATIC METHOD OF QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF INFORMATION AND ITS COMPLEXITY IN A PHYSICAL TEXT BY MEANS OF A COMPUTER

Mayer Robert Valer'evich, Honored scientist of Udmurt Republic; doctor of pedagogical sciences, associate
professor, professor, sub-department of physics and didactics of physics, Glazov State Pedagogical Institute named after V. G. Korolenko (25 Pervomayskaya street, Glazov, Russia), robert_maier@mail.ru

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Background. Creation of new textbooks and manuals on physics demands improvement of objective methods of the content analysis, determination of informativity and complexity of a text. The work purpose is to reveal the most important characteristics of the educational physical text, to develop and approve a technique of measurement of quantity of different types of information in texts and its complexity by means of a computer.
Materials and methods. To solve these tasks the authors created a computer program which analyzes the text and, using the dictionary thesaurus, counts frequencies of referring to various physical and mathematical terms in a text file, and also considers their complexity. The expert defines quantity of mathematical symbols and complexity of formulas. Proceeding from these data, the program counts the volume and complexity of empirical, theoretical, mathematical and general scientific information, volume of scientific information, total volume of a paragraph, share of scientific information, specific quantity of E-, T-, M-knowledge. Also the program creates a profile of the text consisting of a vector of the most often met words and a vector of frequencies. Results are registered in the text file.
Results. The developed technique was tested for measurement of quantity of different types of information and its complexity in four chapters from a university textbook and one paragraph from a school textbook of physics. Complexity and volume of empirical, theoretical, mathematical and general scientific information, volume of scientific information, total volume of a paragraph, share of scientific information, specific quantity of E-, by T-, M knowledge were defined. The received results allowed to carry out the comparative analysis of the analyzed educational texts.
Conclusions. The following has been established: 1) the offered method really allows to measure quantity of different types of information in an educational text and its complexity; 2) five educational texts were subjected to the analysis, strongly differing by quantity of empirical and mathematical information, therefore these two characteristics have to be considered at classification of educational texts.

didactics of physics, content analysis, textbook, information measurement, empirical and theoretical knowledge.

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