Kemins historia i skolböcker

: Mendelejevs historiebeskrivning i läroböcker för kemi i gymnasiet

Abstract

Using history in the natural sciences may feel strange, but the use of history in the natural sciences is a much-explored field that is shown to benefit students' understanding of the natural of sciences.

In this text I present research that relates to the questions of the work. Analysing chemistry textbooks for upper-secondary school students to see how today’s chemistry textbooks use history to explain nature of science. The findings in this study show that the main focus of chemistry book is to transfer knowledge about different theories and models than to show nature of science and therefore history descriptions in textbooks are very limited.

But using historical descriptions in the natural sciences comes with pitfalls that a teacher needs to be aware of before using history in the natural sciences. One of the pitfalls that today's descriptions of history contain is that scientists are usually described as heroes. These hero-descriptions often lead to factual errors, a misleading image of the nature of natural science and make natural science not feel accessible to everyone.

Date of Award	2023-Jun
Original language	Swedish
Supervisor	Elisabeth Einarsson (Supervisor), Anders Jönsson (Assessor) & Kristina Juter (Examiner)