Didactic-methodological elements of high school history textbooks

A school textbook is defined in scientific literature in different ways and many roles in an institutionalized process of upbringing and education are attributed to it. If they were all systematized we could say that a textbook represents: a) a source of information, b) help in structuring and organizing learning, c) a guide through the learning and teaching process. Given that in scientific research, especially dealing with history textbooks, advantage was mostly given to the content of the textbook considering its role as an information source, in this paper we will, without denying the importance of its content, observe it only as a didacticmethodological teaching tool whose primary role is to organize, structuralize and direct the processes of not only learning, but also teaching. We base the emphasis on the importance of the didactic-methodological dimension of the textbook on the fact that it determines the way of efficient reception, understanding, memorizing, communication, motivation and self-study in the same way that it influences logic, organization and structuring the process of teaching. Our goal is to determine textbook elements or instruments and didactic-methodological criteria of their arrangement on the basis of scientific literature that deals with the issues of teaching and textbook problems, in order to discover a desirable didactic-methodological conception of history textbooks. Given that there is no scientific theory that deals exclusively with textbooks and neither is there a generally accepted criterion on which a textbook analysis can be carried out, we consider that with this paper we will partially contribute to the establishment of theoretical postulates of that which could be called the science of the textbook.