A Longitudinal Analysis of the Extent and Manner of Representations of Nature of Science in U.S. High School Chemistry, Biology, and Physics Textbooks

Abd‐El‐Khalick, Fouad; Belarmino, Jeremy J.; Brunner, Jeanne L.; Le, An-Phong; Myers, John Y.; Summers, Ryan G.; Wahbeh, Nader; Waight, Noemi; Waters, Mindy; Zeineddin, Ava A.

doi:10.4324/9781315650524-2

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The present study adopted a semi‐structured, document analysis approach following the lead of recent empirical studies (Abd‐El‐Khalick et al, ; Abd‐El‐Khalick, Belarmino, et al, ; Abd‐El‐Khalick, Myers, et al ) that identified and characterized NOS representation in textual materials. An existing rubric, developed and used previously to analyze U.S. high school science textbooks for NOS treatment and presentation (cf.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representations of nature of science in U.S. science standards: A historical account with contemporary implications

et al. 2019

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This study evaluated the representations of nature of science (NOS) in U.S. state science standards, and examined the changes in these representations from documents advanced in the 1980s through 2016. Drawing from the consensus perspective on NOS and prior studies focusing on the analysis of textual content, documents were inspected for 10 target NOS aspects: the empirical, tentative, inferential, creative, theory-driven, and social NOS, in addition to the myth of "The Scientific Method," the nature of scientific theories and laws, and the social and cultural embeddedness of science.Ninety-eight state documents from 48 states were analyzed and multiple editions were collected from 34 states. Additionally, relevant materials from the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) were assessed for their coverage of the same NOS aspects. Collected materials were scored as whole documents, including over 11,000 pages of text in total, on each target aspect, which reflected the treatment (naïve vs. informed) of NOS in text and the manner of presentation (explicit vs. implicit). Overall, surprisingly, state standards documents have improved very little with respect to their NOS coverage over the last 30 years. NOS standards documents remain silent on a majority of key aspects of NOS, and the number of aspects showing explicit, informed representations has held constant. The NGSS performed well compared to many contemporary documents, but they failed to address all target NOS aspects in a desirable manner. Further

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representations of nature of science in U.S. science standards: A historical account with contemporary implications

et al. 2019

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“…One possible reason for this scarcity of research on NOSrelated textbook tasks is that there have been very few textbooks that are designed to teach NOS. This implies that NOS is still treated as secondary to content knowledge and is not granted its own value in textbooks (Abd-El-Khalick et al, 2017;Campanile, Lederman, & Kampourakis, 2015).…”

Section: Instructional Tasks For Science and Nos Instructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eliciting students’ understanding of nature of science with text-based tasks: insights from new Korean high school textbooks

Park

Yang

Song

2020

International Journal of Science Education

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Research on nature of science (NOS) have confirmed that students' understanding of NOS is best achieved by explicitly considering NOS a cognitive learning expectation and providing opportunities to reflect on it. However, little has been discussed on how to design and use tasks enhancing students' NOS understanding. In an attempt to fill this gap, we analysed the way NOS tasks are used in seven textbooks for a new subject 'scientific inquiry and experimentation' in Korea. Our analysis of 84 tasks led to three categories being identified: guiding to NOS ideas, expanding NOS understanding and thinking critically about NOS. Whereas the majority of the textbook tasks were used as guides to declarative NOS ideas, few tasks invited students to think critically about controversial aspects of NOS. Most tasks were pointed at the epistemic aspects related to scientific methods or knowledge, while the social aspects of science were seldom addressed. Besides, the number and diversity of NOS tasks varied significantly across different publishers. Based on these findings, we call for more strategic and systemic use of NOS tasks in science textbooks, including the use of diverse tasks in proper manners and sequences, as a crucial step to successful NOS instruction in schools.

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“…In addition, because most textbooks analysed so far have focused on science content knowledge rather than NOS itself, most NOS references in these textbooks were given in an 'implicit' way (Abd-El-Khalick et al 2008;Li et al 2018;McDonald 2017). This means that NOS was only implied in the text but not made 'visible' to students by explicit statements (Abd-El-Khalick et al 2017). These research reports led us to ask two research questions, respectively, on the content and methods of SIE textbooks' NOS representations: (a) What aspects of the NOS are represented in Korean SIE textbooks?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representations of Nature of Science in New Korean Science Textbooks: The Case of ‘Scientific Inquiry and Experimentation’

Yang

Park

Song

2020

Science Education in the 21st Century

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Nature of science (NOS) is becoming a core component of both science education research and curriculum policy around the globe. In particular, how textbooks should portray NOS aspects have been of keen interest to science educators. This chapter outlines the background and motivations for Korea's new compulsory subject, scientific inquiry and experimentation (SIE), and analyses how textbooks for this subject present NOS aspects using historical episodes. The aim is to help textbook authors and policymakers by examining the opportunities and challenges of Korea's new NOS curricular initiative. The results indicate that textbooks tend to focus on the cognitive and epistemic characteristics of science, with limited representation of social and institutional NOS aspects. While textbooks often included multiple NOS aspects that underlie each historical episode, in most cases these aspects were implicitly addressed without proper cues for students' reflection about them. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for textbook authors and science teachers.

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A Longitudinal Analysis of the Extent and Manner of Representations of Nature of Science in U.S. High School Chemistry, Biology, and Physics Textbooks

Cited by 10 publications

References 1 publication

Representations of nature of science in U.S. science standards: A historical account with contemporary implications

Representations of nature of science in U.S. science standards: A historical account with contemporary implications

Eliciting students’ understanding of nature of science with text-based tasks: insights from new Korean high school textbooks

Representations of Nature of Science in New Korean Science Textbooks: The Case of ‘Scientific Inquiry and Experimentation’

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