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Bailey won the URSCO travel award to attend SERMACS conference in Puerto Rico!

Bailey will give a talk about our analysis of representations in chemistry textbooks as part of our literature review project on studies about chemistry textbooks. Instructors and students frequently interact with textbooks in the science classroom. As such, science textbooks can shape the way curriculum material is developed, delivered, and received. In our study, we have compiled a rigorous and comprehensive overview of the trends found in existing research studies analyzing chemistry textbooks. In total, we have reviewed 43 studies analyzing chemistry textbooks published between the years 1981 and 2021. Of these, 9 studies analyze how representations are utilized within chemistry textbooks. Inductive coding was used to compare various features across the chemistry textbook studies (e.g., samples, theoretical frameworks, methods, results, etc.). Our findings indicate that many of the studies focus primarily on the analyses of the type, number, function, and features (i.e., captions, labels, and indexing) of representations in chemistry textbooks. Very few studies investigate how students and instructors interact with the representations within chemistry textbooks. Our findings and implications will be presented.