Exploring Characteristics of Science Practice presented in Energy Related Units of Secondary School Science Textbooks

This research aimed to analyze the inquiry activities of energy related units in science textbooks from 7th to 10th grades, developed by the revised 2009 curriculum and explore their characteristics of science practice. The perception of inquiry in school science moved toward scientific practices from simple hands on activity. Millar (2010) focused this aspect and developed a framework of analysing objectives, contents, and logical structures of inquiries. National Research Council (2012) proposed 8 features of school science practices distinguished from technologies. For the study, 7th to 10th science textbooks, which were adopted and used in the most schools among several textbook publishing companies, were used for analyses in Millar (2010)’s framework and NRC (2012)’s 8 features of science practices. Based on the findings, there was no feature of asking questions in any energy related inquiry activities in science textbooks. We found more thinking-type of activities in 10th than 7th, 8th and 9th. The objectives of activities in 10th focused on mostly aquisition of knowledge and skills than scientific inquiry. The logical structure of all the target inquiry activities indicated deductive ways where students collect data on a situation, then think about how it might be summarized or explained.