Research Information System
Participatory Educational Research, vol.7, no.3, pp.192-216, 2020 (Scopus)
Textbooks are one of the primary sources for students to obtain
knowledge, so they should present accurate knowledge through textual
and visual representations. The goal of the current study is to examine the
representations in middle school science textbooks based on the diagram
coding scheme to find out a general picture of how representations used
in the science textbooks over the fifteen years. The sample consists of
6247 representations from twelve middle school science textbooks (four
each of sixth, seventh, and eighth grades) from 2002 to 2017. Content
analysis was used to analyze the representations in textbooks, which were
gathered by document analysis. The representations were evaluated
concerning the combination of two main diagram coding schemes.
Findings showed that iconic representations are prevalent in middle
school science textbooks. There are limited charts, graphs and augmented
reality representations in the science textbooks. Furthermore, there are
more male representations than female ones, representations are mostly
indexed in the main texts, and captions are mainly problematic in middle
school science textbooks. The findings based on the two diagrams coding
scheme are mainly coherent with each other. Science textbooks should
encourage students to interpret and translate between different
representations to enable them accurate knowledge.