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Conceptual Variation or Incoherence? Textbook Discourse on Genes in Six Countries

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate in a systematic and comparative way previous results of independent studies on the treatment of genes and gene function in high school textbooks from six different countries. We analyze how the conceptual variation within the scientific domain of Genetics regarding gene function models and gene concepts is transformed via the didactic transposition into school science textbooks. The results indicate that a common textbook discourse on genes and their function exist in textbooks from the different countries. The structure of science as represented by conceptual variation and the use of multiple models was present in all the textbooks. However, the existence of conceptual variation and multiple models is implicit in these textbooks, i.e., the phenomenon of conceptual variation and multiple models are not addressed explicitly, nor its consequences and, thus, it ends up introducing conceptual incoherence about the gene concept and its function within the textbooks. We conclude that within the found textbook-discourse ontological aspects of the academic disciplines of genetics and molecular biology were retained, but without their epistemological underpinnings; these are lost in the didactic transposition. These results are of interest since students might have problems reconstructing the correct scientific understanding from the transformed school science knowledge as depicted within the high school textbooks. Implications for textbook writing as well as teaching are discussed in the paper.

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Notes

  1. In the case of the Brazilian textbooks, the analysis presented in this paper is different from the one originally shown in Santos et al. (2012), in which a model of gene function was ascribed to the units of context in general, i.e., as presented in the books taken as a whole. That previous approach enabled the conclusion that no genuine historical model was found in the sample, but only hybrid models in which epistemological feature-variants related to the molecular-informational or neoclassical model predominated. Therefore, in this previous analysis models found in the units of context differed only in respect to the degree of hybridization with variants from other models. The approach used here for the Brazilian sample was based on the same raw data, but attributed a model for the units of context of each book individually to make it possible to compare the results from the Swedish, International and Brazilian samples.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Niklas M. Gericke & Mariana Hagberg

  2. History, Philosophy, and Biology Teaching Laboratory, Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

    Vanessa Carvalho dos Santos, Leyla Mariane Joaquim & Charbel N. El-Hani

  3. State University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil

    Vanessa Carvalho dos Santos

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  1. Niklas M. Gericke
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Gericke, N.M., Hagberg, M., dos Santos, V.C. et al. Conceptual Variation or Incoherence? Textbook Discourse on Genes in Six Countries. Sci & Educ 23, 381–416 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9499-8

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