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…

Textbooks are an important aspect of students' school lives and the representation of scientists in textbooks is a proxy for the representation of who can do science. This study investigated the names of scientists and other people mentioned in four commonly used textbooks in the three education systems in the UK and Republic of Ireland (England,…

According to research findings from all over the world, textbooks play an important role for teachers in the choice of methods, content and educational goals. However, the open textbook market, where the state's influence is limited, results in a significant gap between the state (written) curriculum and actual classroom practice. To understand…

Reading is an integral part of chemistry education. The language of chemistry plays a major role when reading chemistry texts and textbooks. Reading textual and non-textual explanations impact students' understanding of chemistry texts and textbooks. In our review we outline the importance of reading texts and textbooks in chemistry education. We…

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is vital to synthesis and provides rich problem-solving opportunities to organic chemistry students. Using the theories of scaffolding, interleaving, and blocking, our research systematically explores how textbooks introduce and reinforce spectral features when teaching students to solve [superscript…

The concept of delocalization (i.e., resonance) is fundamental concept in organic chemistry but essential learning outcomes (LOs) have not previously been proposed nor has there been an analysis of how resonance is taught, despite indications in the literature that students have many non-canonical ideas about the concepts. To address this deficit,…

The difficulties encountered by students in learning chemistry range from human factors to the intrinsic nature of chemistry. To enhance students' understanding of chemistry, there is a wide consensus within the community of chemistry educators on the importance of and need to integrate different levels of representations in chemistry teaching and…

This paper focuses on the procedure and results for analyzing text-difficulty in lower-secondary chemistry textbooks in the Czech Republic. The authors use established methodology for text-difficulty analysis by Nestler, adapted by Prucha and Pluskal by adding a second independent analyser to improve reliability. Some textbooks do not follow the…

We present a critical discussion of how chemistry textbooks treat the electrolysis of water and aqueous salt solutions, based on a survey of general chemistry textbooks in English and Korean at secondary and tertiary levels, also informed by the historical background of 19th-century debates. English-language textbooks present various and…

The goals of this study were (1) determine the prevalence of various features of representations in five general chemistry textbooks used in the United States, and (2) use cognitive load theory to draw implications of the various features of analyzed representations. We adapted the Graphical Analysis Protocol (GAP) (Slough et al., 2010) to look at…

This study investigates the nature of intended secondary chemistry curricula, as they are represented by chemistry textbooks, from seven Arabic countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The curricula are evaluated through analysis of the officially approved 10th grade chemistry textbooks used nationwide in all…

The main objective of this work is to analyse the visual representations (VRs) of the microcosm depicted in nine Greek secondary chemistry school textbooks of the last three decades in order to construct a systemic network for their main conceptual framework and to evaluate the contribution of each one of the resulting categories to the network.…

In this work, we developed an ontological tool, based on the scientific realism of Mario Bunge, for the analysis of the presentation of natural processes in science textbooks. This tool was applied to analyze the presentation of the concept of osmosis in 16 chemistry and biology books at different educational levels. The results showed that more…

That different levels of representation are important for complete understanding of chemistry is an accepted fact in the chemistry education community. This study sought to uncover types of representations used in given physical chemistry textbooks. Textbooks play a central role in the teaching and learning of science (chemistry), and in some…

This study develops a tool to identify errors in the presentation of natural laws based on the epistemology and ontology of the Scientific Realism of Mario Bunge. The tool is able to identify errors of different types: (1) epistemological, in which the law is incorrectly presented as data correlation instead of as a pattern of causality; (2)…