History of Science in Two Recent Versions of High School Physics Textbooks in China

The history of science has a unique value to teaching, and textbooks play an important role in permeating the history of science in science courses. This study aims to compare the presentation of history of science in two versions of high school physics textbooks in China. We selected the 2019 edition of the national and local textbooks as samples. The revised Leite’s checklist is used to conduct statistics and comparative analysis on the history of science content in the two versions of textbooks, referred to as the PEP and Luke versions described in more detail in the paper. The results show that, in terms of the quantity and presentation of the history of science, the PEP version contains more history of science, while the Luke version presents the historical content more intuitively. In terms of the type and organization of the history of science, the Luke version describes scientists and the type of evolution in more detail. In the presentation of the history of science, both of the two versions of textbooks are mainly based on texts written by textbook authors, supplemented by pictures of scientists and instruments. In the description of the contexts of the history of science, both tend to use the scientific context to present the history of science. In terms of the status of the history of science content, it mostly acts as a fundamental role in the Luke version while plays a complementary one in the PEP version. As for the learning activities related to the history of science, both tend to set up normal-level activities. The two versions of textbooks are relatively poor in the internal consistency of the textbooks with respect to the historical information and interdisciplinary activity design. Only Compulsory Book 1 of PEP version has the content of history of science as bibliography, and both of the two versions of textbooks seldom have history of science books as its bibliography.