Do physics textbooks promote conceptual understanding?

As in many other countries, there is a shift in Germany from input (curricular) oriented to output (standards) oriented science education (Schecker & Parchmann, 2007; Nentwig & Schanze, 2007). Thereby the intended curricula contain less content. As this takes place, other curricular materials — like textbooks — become more important for teaching as teachers use them to develop their implemented curriculum (c.f. Valverde et al., 2002). Van Eijck and Roth (2008) point out that teachers use textbooks to guide them in choosing and structuring topics for teaching; they also follow the depth or broadness of specific content in the textbooks while planning lessons. Due to the increasing importance of curriculum materials, we analysed physics textbooks concerning their content coverage and content structure using concept maps. Goal of the presented study is to prove whether physics textbooks promote this development of conceptual understanding or whether they present fragmented knowledge pieces. One result is that almost 90 % of the terms in the analysed textbooks are used only once or twice throughout the entire textbooks. As we were able to show, the textbooks’ content covers huge areas but they are only weakly connected. Based on our results it might be argued that the textbooks do not promote conceptual understanding. They instead concentrate on factual knowledge, and even the important terms — seen from a graphanalytic point of view — are rarely used to connect different content areas. As the textbooks fail to develop a coherent content structure which provides conceptual understanding of physics, one might argue that besides competence standards a core curriculum is needed. It would promote concepts that are highly important and lead to a similar knowledge that is usable in many different contexts.