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.

KEYWORDS:

• Science education
• textbook research
• literature review
• research trends
• journals

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Charles University Research Centre program No. UNCE/HUM/024 and the Grant Agency of Charles University GA UK No. 562119. The authors are grateful for this support. 

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Karel Vojíř http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7619-9891

Martin Rusek http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6919-9076

Notes

1 The smaller number of papers may suggest a decrease in the field, however, it may also be caused by the time the search was conducted (February 2019) when not all papers published in 2018 may have been accessible via the WoS database yet.

2 Between 2008–2012, 990 SER papers were published whereas there were 1088 (see Lin et al., 2018, 2014) between 2013–2017.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UNCE: [grant number UNCE/HUM/024]; Grantová Agentura, Univerzita Karlova: [grant number 562119].