2023 Volume 64 Issue 2 Pages 163-173
The purpose of this study was to classify all questions in lower secondary school Science textbooks approved for 2020 by three textbook companies (Company X, Company Y, and Company Z) according to a framework based on Sekine et al. (2012), and to clarify the characteristics of these questions. The results of the analysis revealed and clarified the following four points: (1) Verifiable questions such as “how + verb,” “ how/what + noun,” and “what” accounted for about 83% of the total. (2) In the comparison by domain, the tendency of “questions” is different in each domain. In the energy domain, “questions” related to relationships and regularity are often seen. In the particle domain, “yes/no” questions tend to be common. In the life domain, many “properties” are found. In the Earth domain, “why” questions tend to be the most common type. (3) In the comparison by grade, the tendency of “question” was different in the second and third grades: “where” tended to be more common in the second grade, while “what” questions, as well as those related to “change/state”, tended to be more common in the third grade. (4) In the comparison across the three publishers, “how + verb,” “what,” and “means” were found most frequently in Company Y’s Science textbooks.
