The aim of this study is to show what was taught in school during a transitional period, when the focus of education was shifting from nature conservation to biodiversity conservation. Twenty senior high school biology textbooks, which explained the concept of biodiversity, were studied and analyzed. A study on how the statements in those textbooks on the three elements of biodiversity, namely genetic, species and ecosystem, and on biodiversity conservation methods corresponded to items in the SCB guidelines for conservation literacy revealed the following:

A review of statements in the textbooks published between 1973 and 2008 shows that the subject of conservation has expanded from the conservation of ecosystems to the conservation of biodiversity. Senior high school students have always been taught about the three constituent concepts of biodiversity, but they were sometimes taught about genetic diversity after learning about biodiversity conservation. And few of the textbooks touched upon the subject of protecting sufficient areas, where natural ecological and evolutionary processes are maintained.

These facts show the following characteristic during a transitional period from education on nature conservation to education on biodiversity conservation ; while a statement in the textooks shows directionality in line with natural ecological process changing from philosophy to a scientific approach, there were few statements in there to associate the three elements of biodiversity with biodiversity conservation method from scientific approach

The aim of this study is to elucidate how biodiversity was taught in school before the biodiversitywas explicitly included in the curricula guidelines. Analysis of 103 senior high school biologytextbooks published between 1948 and 2008 revealed a characteristic debut of "diversity of the livingkingdom" in a textbook published in 1957, of "diversity and commonality" in the early 1970s, and of"biodiversity" in a textbook published in 2004. While the term "biodiversity" was spelled out only ineight textbooks, 17 others, going as far back as 1973, were found to touch upon the concept ofbiodiversity without explicitly mentioning the word. Of the 25 textbooks, which touched upon theconcept of biodiversity, four dealt with all three elements of biodiversity―genetic, species and ecosys-tem―whereas the 21 others only mentioned one or two elements of biodiversity. Statements on thetopic were typically found in chapters on ecology, but four of the textbooks touched upon geneticdiversity in a chapter that dealt with taxonomy and evolution. Views of the authors on the ecologicalconservation of nature, stated in the opening and/or closing chapters, were the only links foundbetween the concepts of biodiversity that were described separately in the respective chapters.