Trends in science education research in Taiwan: A content analysis of the Chinese journal of science education from 1993 to 2012

Abstract

This chapter describes a content analysis that served three purposes. First, it investigated science education research trends in Taiwan as represented by publications from 1993 to 2012 in the Chinese Journal of Science Education (CJSE), an official journal of the Chinese Association for Science Education in Taiwan. This was done by breaking down the 20-year interval into four periods. Second, the results were compared with those in international journals. Finally, we analyzed trends in authorship as well as in the tendency to publish in CJSE compared to the international journals. We analyzed 394 articles published in the first 20 years of CJSE (1993–2012). The results showed that CJSE published a very high percentage of empirical studies (96 %) over the past 20 years. The most common research area involved learning (26.4 %), including 15.0 % of concept learning and 11.4 % of process skills, followed by teacher education (12.9 %), and teaching strategies (12.9 %). Studies investigating goals, policy, curriculum (2.3 %), informal learning (1.8 %) or textbook and text analysis (1/0 %) were equality absent. In addition, CJSE published several relatively balanced quantitative and qualitative studies. Twenty-six percent of the articles were pure quantitative data while 22.6 % were qualitative reports. Moreover, there was a high percentage (25.3 %) of articles, which include both quantitative and qualitative data. We also found that about 74.6 % of the studies used students as their participants, while 28.4 % had samples composed of teachers (including pre- and in-service teachers). Finally, the results revealed that science education researchers in Taiwan tended to publish in either CJSEor international journals. Very few Taiwanese researchers published in both. Implications for the future of science education research in Taiwan are discussed in this chapter.