latent-profiles
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- PaperEdArXiv (OSF Preprints)20 Jul 2026
Beyond the Average: Analyzing Heterogeneity and Latent Profiles of Cognitive Involvement in Iranian Junior High School Social Studies
Hossein Talebzadeh
This study analyzed cognitive involvement heterogeneity in Iranian junior high school social studies textbooks using the William Romey method and cluster analysis. Three latent profiles were identified: Active-Question Dominant, Fully Passive, and Hyper-Active, with Grade 7 showing extreme textual irregularity. The findings highlight a mismatch between passive textual content and demanding assessment tasks, suggesting a need for structural alignment.
Original abstract
Previous evaluations of school textbooks have predominantly focused on aggregate overall averages, thereby overlooking critical intra-textbook heterogeneity. This study aimed to identify latent profiles of cognitive involvement and assess the instability of instructional design within Iranian junior high school social studies textbooks. Utilizing a secondary data analysis of datasets derived from the Comparative Adjudication Protocol (CAP)—encompassing 44 lessons across 2 core textbooks (Social Studies Grade 7 and Social Studies Grade 8)—cognitive involvement indices for text, images, and questions were calculated using the William Romey (1968) method. To quantify internal heterogeneity, the Coefficient of Variation (CV) and Levene's test were utilized, while K-means clustering with Euclidean distance (Hair et al., 2010) was employed to uncover latent profiles. The findings revealed that the Social Studies Grade 7 textbook exhibited the highest textual irregularity (CV = 186.84%), whereas the Social Studies Grade 8 textbook demonstrated more moderate text heterogeneity (CV = 134.78%). Levene's test confirmed a statistically significant difference in text variances across the two textbooks (p = 0.028), indicating that Grade 7 social studies is structurally more fragmented than Grade 8. However, cluster analysis uncovered three distinct structural profiles, revealing that 50.0% of the analyzed lessons fell into an "Active-Question Dominant" cluster, while 31.8% were classified as "Fully Passive" and 18.2% as "Hyper-Active." These findings demonstrate that middle school social studies textbooks—particularly at Grade 7—exhibit extreme textual heterogeneity and a persistent question-text disjuncture, where end-of-chapter tasks demand high analytical engagement while the textual content remains predominantly passive. Consequently, future curricular interventions must prioritize structural alignment between narrative content and assessment tasks, alongside systematic reduction of textual variance across grade levels.