The topic of chemistry safety was included at the margins of traditional chemistry education in China. In order to understand the concerns of the safety issues based on the new chemistry curriculum in the mainland China secondary school, this study analyzed old and new secondary chemistry curriculum standards via the Natural Language Processing…

Integrated science is a ubiquitous school subject that is found in primary and middle-school levels around the world. Being a hybrid subject comprising several science disciplines, it poses many challenges to teachers as they are obliged to teach beyond their disciplinary comfort zones. In addition, this subject is prone to a lack of coherence,…

The gender gap remains an issue in the biological education community. This study explores the extent to which an egalitarian gender ideology, encapsulated in five biological science textbooks for upper secondary schools in China, manifests through representational, interactive and compositional meanings of social semiotic theory. The findings…

Formal understanding of the nature of science (NOS) has been considered to be a major contributor to nurturing students' scientific literacy. In China, this view has been endorsed in the new standard for high school physics curriculum, which has guided the development of the new generation physics textbooks. Following the analytical framework…

This research explores whether classroom life (CL), textbooks (TE), and learning initiative (LI) are mediators between instruction (P) and science performance, as well as whether these mechanisms are moderated by gender. 484 eighth grade students completed the questionnaire with four subscales of P, LI, TE, and CL. For the needs of triangulation…

Background: STEM education, which features interdisplines and integration of disciplines, influences the reform of curriculum and teaching, and is reflected in Chinese science textbooks. Purpose: This study aims to analyse how STEM and its integration factors are presented in Chinese science textbooks. Sample: Three sets of high school science…

Textbooks use images, in addition to text, for delivering knowledge, thereby convey attitudes and values of students including those on gender bias. The gender bias presented in textbook images affects in subtle ways the students' learning outcomes, career choices, and how they perceive science. However, prior research has relied on explicit…

Since inquiry was first introduced to science education, a lot of inquiry-based tasks have appeared in textbooks for supporting an inquiry-based approach. These tasks have great potential to direct the implementation of an inquiry-based approach, as teachers rely heavily on the use of existing instructional materials in most K-12 classrooms.…

Understanding the nature of science (NOS) is an important goal of science education, and textbooks are a key factor in shaping students' conceptions of NOS. In this study, we analysed NOS represented in middle school chemistry textbooks in the Chinese mainland. The selected materials were three most commonly adopted textbook series, which were…

This study investigates the alignment between curriculum standards and textbooks, based on a standards-based science education context. The analysis sample includes the High School Biology Curriculum Standards and five editions of biology textbooks in China. Porter's alignment model is used to construct a two-dimensional (content areas and…

We have examined an experienced chemistry teacher's pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of teaching with practical work in China. Based on the well-known PCK model by Magnusson S. J., Krajcik J. and Borko H., (1999), "Nature, sources, and development of pedagogical content knowledge for science teaching," in Gess-Newsome J. and Lederman…

This study applied the Porter's alignment model to construct a localized two-dimensional framework based on Anderson's taxonomy. The research chose the third-grade primary school science textbooks from two representative presses in China and Japan, coded the textbooks and curriculum standards, calculated the alignment level between the textbooks…

Integrating the nature of science (NOS) into textbooks is one of the challenges in science curricula. This case study assessed the issue based on a sample of high school biology textbooks in Mainland China. We quantitatively compared changes in the extent, quality, and distribution of NOS representations between 2004 and 2019 editions. Three main…

Based on previous international studies, a content analysis scheme has been designed and used from the perspective of culture to study the history of science (HOS) in science textbooks. Nineteen sets of Chinese science textbooks have been analyzed. It has been found that there are noticeable changes in the quantity, content, layout, presentation,…

Colonial education worldwide has relied on various concepts, from trying to mirror the content of the sovereign country to developing unique content pertaining to the colonies themselves. In this paper, we examined the nature of colonial education for the Japanese in northeast China ("Manchuria") during the colonial period from the…