Representation of Nature of Science in Chemistry Textbooks: Employing Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach as a Framework

One of the important goals of science education is to have scientifically literate people. A proper understanding of the Nature of Science (NOS) is one of the requirements for scientific literacy. Textbooks, which are the concrete materials of curriculars, have an important function in teaching nature of science. The aim of this study is to determine how NOS addressed in the chemistry textbooks according to the publishers of the textbooks, the school types the text books used, and topics in the textbooks. The Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to NOS (RFN), recently offering an alternative framework for nature of science analyses, was used as the framework to analyze the textbooks. Four 9th grade chemistry textbooks which consisted of five chapters and which was published by three different publishers for two different types of high schools were examined. The results showed a total of 419 citations related to NOS, and 335 of them were related to the cognitive-epistemic structure of science while 84 of them were addressed the social-institutional aspect. However, there isn't any single citation related to the political power structures that form the social-institutional aspect of science in the textbooks. In the social-institutional aspect of science, the social values of science were discussed more frequently than other sub-dimensions. More citations were found related to NOS in the textbook, which is taught in science high schools that aims to prepare students to science and technology related professions. The "chemistry as a science field" and "atomic and periodic system", are the first two chapters including more references to NOS. In addition, it was realized that none of the citations explicitly addressed NOS. The results show that a significant effort is needed both in practice and research for teaching the social-institutional in education as well as in science education.