Using the Lens of Essential Questions-Perspectives to Investigate the Representations of Chemical Thinking in Chinese Secondary Chemistry Textbooks

Chemical thinking has been widely recognized as a core competence that students develop in chemistry education. This study examined the distribution and representation forms of chemical thinking in the five Chinese high school chemistry textbooks aligned with the new national standards in Mainland China. We employed the framework of essential questions-perspectives (EQ-P) with 12 categories to analyze chemical thinking in those textbooks. These categories are structured around three essential questions: chemical identification, explanation, and synthesis. Each essential question addressed four chemical perspectives. We employed the deductive and inductive content analysis to conduct our study. The paragraphs of the main text, figures or tables with textual descriptions, margin columns, and experiments or activities served as the analytical units. A total of 239 textbook excerpts that reflect chemical thinking from those units were identified and analyzed. Deductive coding strategy was used to identify the distribution patterns of 12 chemical thinking categories. Inductive coding strategy was conducted to elicit the representation forms of chemical thinking. We found that the chemical ways of thinking based on the perspective of interaction among submicroscopic components (e.g., molecules, atoms, ions) to explain and predict the properties and behaviors of substances dominated five high school textbooks, far surpassing the other 11 chemical thinking categories. Besides, the analysis of those selected textbooks led to three forms of representation, consisting of "questions present-perspectives present", "questions present-perspectives absent", and "questions absent-perspectives present". The majority of form was described as "questions absent-perspectives present". Our study put insight into the integration of chemical thinking into textbooks that calls for covering a wide range category of chemical thinking and representing them in a "questions present-perspectives present" form.