| The information age so unprecedentedly speeds the accumulation of knowledge that it has placed a great challenge to traditional education.Scientific methods, as it bridges theory and practice, serve as the gateway to scientific activities. Applying Scientific methods into education,therefore, has been increasingly raising people’s concern and has become one of the major considerations of education reform. Since textbooks play a fundamental role in the school curriculum, the embodiment of scientific methods in textbooks has been one of the indispensable parts of education reform. China has lately started the application of scientific methods in education, the textbook compilation and system evaluation of which is however much less competent than that of the US who has made much achievement in this field because of long-time attention and efforts, and the complete textbook compiling system of the US is particularly worthy of investigation for the purpose of sheding light on China’s education of scientific methods. This paper therefore aims to provide some suggestions to the compiling of China’s chemistry textbooks through a comparative study between the two countries’ chemistry textbooks.The first part of the paper introduces the research background,including the propositon, the justification and several concepts of the issue. The second part is based on an interview about high schoolteachers’ opinions of the scientific methods in textbooks. The third part,the body of this paper, compares the American textbook – Chemistry Concepts and Applications – with China’s PEP edition chemistry textbooks and evaluates their presentaion of scientific methods via comparisons of items arrangement, charts design, exercises layout,introduction, experiments, etc. The part ends with a newly-compiled chapter on “stoichiometry” with the application of scientific methods.The last part concludes the discoveries of this research and presents several sugestions to China’s textbook compilation work. |
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