The purpose of this study was to explore instructional designs for promoting inquiry practices in secondary school textbooks. Three criteria were employed to select the textbooks: (1) approved by the Ministry of Education in Singapore and the Ministry of Education and Culture in Indonesia, (2) used in secondary schools, and (3) included content…

In this study, we analyzed how scientific terms such as principle, law and theory are depicted in Chemistry textbooks used by students in Singapore. There are very few reports in the science or chemistry education literature that explicitly explore the term principle, although all three terms appear in a number of topics in the high school…

Introduction: Textbook tasks are considered as tools for implementing, endorsing mathematical thinking and thereby creating chances for mathematics learning. Therefore, textbook tasks can potentially influence and structure the way students think and can serve to limit or to broaden their views of the subject matter with which they are engaged.…

Visual representation in school textbooks plays an important role for physics teaching and learning. The integration of graphics with text has drawn attention of physics educators in recent years due to the close relationship between graphics and relevant text. The purpose of this study is to examine visual representation of optical content in…

As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore's nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published…

This study reports on comparing the presentation of mathematical content, types of responses required of students, conformity with the curriculum outcomes, and potentially confusing expressions in the subjects of percentages, triangles, and quadrilaterals of fifth-grade mathematics textbooks used in Turkey and Singapore. Document analysis of the…

The purpose of this study is to compare the differences of four essential aspects (i.e., representational forms, contextual features, cognitive demand levels, and response types) embedded in mathematical problems within the topics of numbers and operations in mathematics textbooks used in Finland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. This…

This article contributes to debates on how the history curriculum should be organised (i.e., thematically, or chronologically). It also contributes to the limited empirical research that employs a sociocultural approach to history education and the limited empirical research on history education in Singapore. Drawing on semistructured interviews…

The present study compared Turkish and Singaporean textbooks with respect to their instructional contents on a difficult topic for most students: the concept of angle. The study used the 3rd and 4th grade mathematics textbooks taught in Turkish and Singaporean schools. The analysis showed that Turkish textbooks defined the angle as a static…

This study analysed the designs of algebraic problems in elementary mathematics textbooks used in Finland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. This study employed a content-analysis method that focused on four dimensions: representational forms, cognitive demand levels (CDLs), contextual features, and types of responses. The result of the…

Textbooks, which form the staples of a teacher's set of resources, play a critical role in deciding what and how mathematics is taught in classrooms. However, textbooks do not always present concepts in ways that enhance understanding by students, nor are they always comprehensive in the treatment of a topic. In this exploratory study, we analyse…

The purpose of the study was to explore how contents related to sustainable development were presented in Japanese, Korean, and Singaporean elementary mathematics textbooks. For this purpose, the contents in the textbooks were analyzed at both macro and micro levels through a mixed method research. The results showed that the…

This study investigates the inclusion of health education concepts in biology textbooks in the United States of America and Singapore. It employs a content analysis methodology to examine biology textbooks, considering the theme as a unit and dividing health concepts into four main fields. The findings for both countries indicate that the field of…

In this study, Turkish and Singaporean textbooks were compared in terms of teaching content for multiplying fractions, a subject that most students have difficulty in understanding. The study analyzed the 6th-grade mathematics textbook published by the Turkish Ministry of National Education and its Singaporean counterpart. While the Singaporean…

Background: Nature of Science (NOS) is defined to be the epistemology of science, and comprised of distinctive defining aspects. The representation of these NOS aspects in school science textbooks is likely to affect how students understand NOS. Representation of NOS aspects can differ between topics even within the same textbook and these topical…