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Comparative evaluation of lower-secondary physics and chemistry textbooks: the role of science education
Tsoulos Georgios, Tsaparlis Georgios
(University of Ioannina-Department of Chemistry)
Paper in National Conference proceedings
Greek
In this paper, the authors attempt to make a quantitative comparison between three types of physics and chemistry lower-secondary education textbooks. The first type was the standard official physics and chemistry textbooks used in the Greek secondary educational system and which makes use of the traditional teaching method (teacher-centered and the student treated as “blank paper”). The second type was a science textbook written by American Researchers and made use of the teaching method of inquiry. The third type was a science textbook based on the constructivistic method of teaching. The textbooks were evaluated by 34 teachers on the basis of the following five criteria: content, structure, readability, methodology and comprehension. The following eight specific lesson units were chosen for the evaluation: heat, chemical reactions, gravity, solutions, energy, electricity, mass-density, linear simple motion. Even though the sample used was marginally small for extracting safe quantitative conclusions, there are general trends pointing to the superiority of the latter two textbook types relative to the standard one in nearly all criteria.
This is an interesting piece of work providing evidence for the need of the use of modern, more appealing, student-oriented teaching methods in the physical sciences (physics and chemistry) in order to achieve a more permanent educational result. The conclusions of this work are qualitative since they are based on a rather small sample and the research was confined only among teachers (did not involve the students’ opinion)
Dr. Kalimeris Anastasios
T.E.I of Ionian Islands
Assistant Professor