Research And Evaluation On The Representation Of The Nature Of Science In High School Chemistry Textbooks Published By The Shanghai Scientific & Technical Publishers

The Nature of science(NOS)is an important component of the students’ science literacy.For its importance,the quality of textbook’s representation of the NOS will affect teachers’ and students’ cognition of the NOS.The content arrangement of textbook column is flexible and suitable for representing the nature of science.Therefore,it is necessary to analyze the representation of its NOS.This study will take the column of high school chemistry textbook as the research object,and investigate the following two questions:(1)Which dimentions of NOS are represented by the column of the textbook?(2)What are the characteristics and quality of the representation?This work is based on Lederman’s NOS framework.After absorbing the research experience of Abd-El-Khalick et al.,an analysis framework for textbook columns is constructed.It includes ten dimensions: empirical,inferential,tentative,creative,theory-driven,scientific theories and scientific laws,myth of “the scientific method”,interdisciplinary,social dimensions of science and social and culture embeddedness of science.The analytical methods of each dimension are also constructed at once.After chosing the high school chemistry textbooks published by the Shanghai scientific &technical publishers as the research object,the representation of the NOS is analysed by two researchers and several pre-service teachers.Through analysis,it is found that the representation of the NOS of the samples is rich and diverse.The dimensions such as empirical and creative have the highest frequency of representation,and the representation of the dimensions such as empirical and tentative is dominated by the explicit ways.The Invention of the Battery,The Contribution of Chinese Scientists in the Redefinition of the International System of Units,and Metal and Metal Oxide Superconducting Materials are relatively better characterized in the view of the NOS.Based on the result of analysing,this paper puts forward some suggestions such as:The expression of implicit representation can be made more explicit when the textbooks is revised.New columns can be added for the dimensions of the NOS with fewer representations,and columns with insufficient representations can be expanded to further enrich the representation of the NOS in textbooks.In teaching,teachers can revise their views on the NOS by comparing the research framework with conclusion of this study,and explore the idea of constructing the representation of the NOS.