Comparison of nature of science representations in five Chinese high school physics textbooks

Formal understanding of the nature of science (NOS) has been considered to be a major contributor to nurturing students' scientific literacy. In China, this view has been endorsed in the new standard for high school physics curriculum, which has guided the development of the new generation physics textbooks. Following the analytical framework established in the recent literature, this study evaluates the NOS representations in five textbooks approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education regarding the extent, the manner (explicit vs. implicit), the accuracy and completeness (from naive to informed), and the overall consistency of different aspects of NOS. The results show that the representations of NOS in all five physics textbooks are far from satisfactory. The aspects of NOS are fully represented by only three textbooks. For all textbooks, the NOS representations are distributed unevenly throughout the contents, most of which are presented in a few pages of the preface and postscript chapters. Meanwhile, more than half of the aspects are represented implicitly, and the scientific method is poorly or inconsistently represented in three of the five textbooks. It is suggested that NOS needs to be represented explicitly and distributed evenly throughout a textbook in future revisions of the textbooks.

Automated summary

This study evaluated the representations of Nature of Science in five Chinese physics textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education. The results show that all textbooks fell short in adequately representing NOS, with only three textbooks fully representing all aspects. NOS representations were unevenly distributed throughout the contents, with more than half of aspects being implicitly represented, and scientific method being poorly represented in three textbooks.