A Research On The Nature Of Science In Junior High School Physics Textbooks

As time goes by,the role of citizens' scientific literacy in modern society is becoming more and more important.It's said that The citizens' scientific literacy stands for a country's comprehensive national strength.Therefore,the international advocate through science education to enhance the scientific literacy of all students.The understanding of nature of science,which is the nuclear part of scientific literacy,is undoubtedly an important symbol of scientific literacy.In the cultivation of students for the understanding of the nature of science,science textbooks is undoubtedly the core of the curriculum resources.In science education,the presence of nature of science in scientific textbooks is an important approach for teachers and students to understand it.Physics is a very important branch of science subjects,What kind of scientific nature does the physics textbook present to us?This is an important question that needs to be explored.This article has selected Abd-El-Khalick's(1998)Analysis framework on nature of science,scanned and analyzed the contents of physics textbooks in junior high school through the method of combining the quantitative and qualitative analysis to present the characteristics and problems in discourse of nature of science on the textbooks.Research found that physics textbooks in junior high school present10 characteristics,three levels of nature of science.The first level is the scientific knowledge,containing the characteristics of "Creative","Tentative","Scientific theories","Scientific laws";The second level is the science inquiry,including the characteristics of "Empirical",and "Inferential" and "Creative","Theory-driven","Myth of The Scientific Method";The last level is a scientific enterprise,which comprises the characteristics of "Social dimensions of science","Social and culturalembeddedness of science”.They properly present the nature of science as a whole.Although the presence of nature of science on textbooks can boost the nature of science education of middle school students to some extent,there are still three major problems.Firstly,the frequency of presence of scientific knowledge on three textbook is not enough.Secondly,the scientific inquiry presented on Grade Nine overweight Grade Eight;Thirdly,concerning the scientific enterprise," social and cultural embeddedness of science " is presented infrequently,and there is lack of words related to the characteristic of " social dimensions of science”.Finally,the author puts forward some suggestions for both textbook writing and teacher teaching according to the problems presented in the textbook about the nature of science.