High School Chemistry Textbooks: Form and Function A SYMPOSIUM
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What High School Chemistry Texts Do Well and What They Do Poorly Dorothy L. Gabel Science Education, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 Chemistrv teachers freauentlv ask the guestion, "Whv do so many hiih school chemistry students have difficulty with chemistrv?" Manv students feel iust like Lucv in the cartoon when she says, "i was going along real g o d when all of a sudden I pulled a muscle in my head." Some chemistry students appear to pull a muscle by the end of the first week in class, and it happens to many more a t the time that they study the mole concept! Chemistry textbooks should be examined from the student's point of view. After all, the textbooks are purchased for and b y students, not teachers. Do chemistry textbooks facilitate learning? Do they contain muscle relaxers that help students learn chemistry? Cluster Goals There are several basic assumptions that chemists and chemical educators make about what chemical education should accomplish. Some of these assumptions are that 1. Students should understand the nature of the scientific enterprise. 2. Students should have a sense of what chemists do. Career education is an important educational objective. 3. Students should be familiar with the "matter" that surrounds them. How many students think that chemistry deals exclusively with mysterious powders and liquids in jars in the chemical storeroom? 4. Students should be able to sort out sensible statements from
These basic assumptions correspond to what the National Science Teachers Association advocates as the cluster of goals for Project Synthesis (1).Project Synthesis was acompilation of three NSF and NIE national studies of the status of science education in the 70's. The four area goals formulated in Project Synthesis were societal issues, career education, salient knowledge. and uersonal needs. Analvses of all four sources of ~rojec;synthesis indicated that thescience textbook exerts an overwhelming dominance over the science learning experience. This makes it imperative that these four cluster goals be reflected in chemistry texts. Data from one source indicated that 90-94% of 12,000 (science) teachers surveyed used the text 90% of the time (2). When chemistry texts are surveyed, however, it is rarely found that all four of these assumptions are reflected in a single chemistry text or program. In reality, some texts do a poor job a t incorporating more than one of them. One text that was exemplary in including the first two assumptions hut neglected the other two was never the success that it should have been. In the preface of the hook, it is stated: A clear and valid picture of the steps by which scientists proceed is carefully presented and repeatedly used. Observation and measurements lead to the develoornent of unifvina . ..principles and then these principles are used lo interrelate diverse phenomena. Heavy
Presented at the 7th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education in Stillwater. OK, August 12, 1982. Symposium-High School Chemistry Texts: Form and Function.
reliance is placed upon laboratory work so that chemical principles can be drawn directly from student experience. Not only does this give a correct and nonauthoritarian view of the oriein of chemical urinci-
experiment and theory. Chemistry is gradually and logically unfolded, not presented as a collection of facts, dicta, and dogma (3). Successive Editions The above atatcmrnts wrre takvn frum the or:ginal CHEM Study Text. Since the p l ~ l i c a t i mof the CHKM Study trxt in l!Ifi4, other t.htmistry texts h a w undergone major rhangw. Huwver, instead of focusing on [he approach that ('HEM Study endorses, other textbook pul~liahersaddrd additionnl contt:nt that was included in the CH KM Study text. 111(11'cd, what CHEM Study espousrd was lrs-. ob\ i(n~i! TUillustrilte, the change.: that h:>woccurrvd mer a 2tl-year span in sucressive editicms of t h t hvit selling chemistry text, "Mlldern Chemistry" ( 4 ) , have been exa~ninrd.They are t.ypical of changes that have occurred in other texL5 during this same time prri to 19-A in the rl~aoterson atomic theor\.. the i~rri
