History of science in Science education : development and validation of a checklist for analysing the historical content of science textbooks

Abstract

One of the aspects science education should focus on is learning about science. Achieving a good understanding of this aspect requires, among others, the use of the history of science. There is some evidence that teachers rely heavily on textbooks to select the historical content they include in their physical science lessons. On the other hand, Portuguese physical science syllabuses are not very explicit about the teaching of the science. Therefore, textbook writers may not feel compelled to give enough importance to the history of science in their textbooks and consequently little history of science will pervade the science lessons. This paper aims to present a theoretically grounded checklist developed for analyzing the historical content of science textbooks. Five physics textbooks that are different with regard to historical content were analyzed. Inter-ratter agreement was used in order to validate the checklist. The results of the analysis show that the checklist is able to reveal differences among textbooks and that the historical content included in the textbooks is hardly able to give students an adequate image of science and scientists’ work.