Science education textbook research trends: a systematic literature review

Abstract

The number of science education research papers has been rapidly rising in recent years. This number has been particularly influenced by researchers from non-English speaking countries who contribute to the field. With this number of papers, literature reviews gain in importance as they help researchers more easily orient themselves in problem areas. The authors of this study present a literature review on science textbook research. The importance of textbooks in education is indisputable, yet research in this field is surprisingly unbalanced between particular regions or states. In this paper, a review of 183 papers published between 2000 and 2018, indexed to the Web of Science database, is introduced. The results show that researchers in Europe and the USA focus on textbook research more than researchers elsewhere in the world. The textbooks most frequently researched on are science books for secondary schools. Textbook research consists mostly of analysing learning concepts and how concepts are integrated, non-textual elements in textbooks, visual representations, learning content or learning text analysis.

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