Encyclopedia of Science Education

Living Edition
| Editors: Richard Gunstone

Evaluation of Textbooks: Approaches and Consequences

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6165-0_387-3
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Research in science education has recognized the importance of textbooks for learning science effectively. In many parts of the world, for most science teachers at the secondary, high school, and introductory university level courses, the textbook is the only source of information and guide to classroom practice. Given this widespread use of textbooks in most educational systems, their evaluation for improvement is an integral part of the research agenda.

It is important to differentiate two types of approaches related to the evaluation of science textbooks that can be classified as:
  1. (a)

    Domain-general: These studies are based on a series of criteria that can be used for evaluating whole textbooks across disciplines (biology, biochemistry, chemistry, earth science, physics, other). Some of the criteria are related to nature of science, scientific literacy, inquiry, analogies, photographs, gender, comprehensibility, readability, vocabulary load, graphical information, and cultural and...

Keywords

Alpha Particle Science Textbook Historical Reconstruction Textbook Author Chemistry Textbook 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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References

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Epistemology of Science Group, Department of ChemistryUniversidad de OrienteCumanáVenezuela