Analysis and comparison of scientific inquiry activities in eight-grade physics textbooks in China

Abstract

In order to analyse whether or not the characteristic of scientific inquiry activities of textbooks in China satisfy the requirements of China’s new curriculum reforms, content analysis method was adopted to analyze scientific inquiry activities in junior middle school physical textbooks (grade 8) of five editions authorized by the Chinese Ministry of Education. The results show that the inquiry activities in the five versions of textbooks in China cannot meet the requirements of authentic scientific inquiry regardless of the degree of openness or operationality of cognitive processes and are not conducive to develop students’ scientific inquiry skills and scientific reasoning skills. The authors of science textbooks should take note of the latest insights from the world of academia and develop some new authentic scientific inquiry tasks to update textbooks in a prompt manner in order to improve the students’ abilities of scientific inquiry. For the textbook reviewers, the present research not only provides them with specific findings, but also provides them with a method to evaluate textbooks.