Representation of Nature of Science in Chemistry Textbooks: Employing Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach as a Framework

Representation of Nature of Science in Chemistry Textbooks: Employing Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach as a Framework

Suat ÇELİK & Faik Özgür KARATAŞ

ABSTRACT
One of the important goals of science education is to have scientifically literate people. One of the central components of scientific literacy is the nature of science (NOS). Textbooks, which are the concrete materials of curriculars, have an important function in teaching NOS. The purpose of this study is to determine the how chemistry textbooks address NOS by publishers, school types, and chemistry topics. The Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to NOS (RFN), recently offers an alternative framework for nature of science analyzes, was used as the framework to analyze the textbooks. Four 9th grade chemistry textbooks by different publishers for two different types of high schools were examined. The results showed a total of 419 citations related to NOS and 335 of them were related to the cognitive-epistemic structure of science while 84 of them were addressed the social-institutional structure of science. On the other hand, there isn’t any single citation related to the political power structures that form the social-institutional aspect of science in the textbooks. Within the social-institutional aspect of science, which is less represented in the textbooks, social values of science were addressed more often. More citations were found related to NOS in the textbook, which is taught in science high schools that aims to prepare students to science and technology related professions. The units of "chemistry as a science field" and "atomic and periodic system", which are the first two chapters includes more references to NOS. In addition, it was realized that none of the citations explicitly addressed NOS. The results show that a significant effort is needed both in practice and research for teaching the social-institutional aspect of science in chemistry education as well as in science education.

KEYWORDS: Nature of Science, Scientific Literacy, Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach, Chemistry Textbooks, Content Analysis

DOI : [PDF]