Contextualized science teaching: the contribution of photographs included in schools science textbooks

Abstract

Contextualized science teaching has to do with approaching themes from everyday settings that are relevant to students and making explicit the STS interrelationships. Photographs that are included school textbooks are tools that can be used to promote the contextualization of themes to be taught to students. This paper compares photographs included in six 8th and 11th grade textbooks, published by three different editors, in terms of their potential to contribute to contextualized science teaching. Results indicate that the use of photographs is hardly guided by context-based science teaching principles and does not differ too much between the grade levels.