Representations And Assessment Of Instruction Of Nature Of Scientific Laws In Senior Secondary Physics Textbooks: Topics On Laws In Mechanics

As an essential component of scientific literacy, nature of science (NOS) has been, and continues to be emphasized as a central aim for reform efforts in science education.Nature of scientific laws (NSL) was developed as a subset of NOS in this study, on the basis of NOS aspects in current science education reform documents. This study represented and assessed NSL instruction in senior high school physics textbooks.A total of 9 textbooks from 5 countries and regions were selected as research objects. Texts within the topics on laws in mechanics were analyzed, which include Newton's three laws of motion, law of universal gravitation, and law of conservation of momentum.Representations of NSL instruction in textbooks were analyzed using a text coding protocol, which was developed based on the framework constituted by views of nature of scientific laws, accuracy and manner in which these views were addressed. Thereamong,13 views of nature of laws in 4 categories were involved. Levels including naive, mixed and informed were used for scoring NOS understanding in descending order of accuracy. Implicit, explicit and explicit mentioned approaches were involved in teaching views of NOS.Effects of NSL instruction in textbooks were assessed on each of the views of NSL using a scoring rubric on a scale ranging from -3 to +3, which reflected accuracy and manner in which these views were addressed.Results of the present study are as follows. First, almost none of the analyzed textbooks attend to a majority of views of NSL (accounting for 38.46%-53.85% out of 13 views). Second, hardly any of the textbooks represented a naive or mixed understanding of NSL (only once for mixed view). Third, implicit approach was preferred by textbooks in teaching NSL (95.14%). Fourth, teaching effects of views in textbooks were generally low, which would lead to the limited impacts on students'enhancement of NOS understanding.The following claims can be concluded based on the results. First, NSL instruction was not focused consciously in topics on laws in mechanics in textbooks. Second, current instructional content and activities provided the possibility for facilitating NSL teaching. Third, effective approaches to teaching NOS were not well adopted by the analyze textbooks for NSL instruction. Fourth, historical examples and experiments in textbooks were not fully utilized to represent NSL. Fifth, the widespread present situation that students'hold naive NOS understanding and views of NOS are not accorded instructional priority to being addressed in science classroom are partially, at least, explained by what were presented in this study, namely, the status of NSL instruction in the analyzed textbooks. (427 words)...