Classifying End-of-Chapter Questions and Problems for Selected General Chemistry Textbooks Used in the United States

摘要

Science textbooks have a strong influence on curriculum,instruction, and assessment at all educational levels and thus have been the object of a variety of research studies (1-3). In the case of college introductory chemistry, the role of the textbook is so prominent that discussions about curriculum are frequently intertwined with the evaluation of the “prototypical textbook”: an instructional resource that is assumed to have a relatively fixed topic structure and educational philosophy independent of the authors (4-9). Analysis of the general chemistry textbook is thus of central importance if one is interested in understanding, for example, the nature and relevance of the course content or the types of learning that are valued in the discipline.