Curricula and textbooks for secondary education in Chile: what opportunities for scientific literacy they offer?

Abstract

In the 90 Chile undertook a comprehensive reform of national education curriculum, which posed a scientific literacy approach to natural science. The purpose of this paper is to review the presence of this approach in two documents of great importance in pedagogy: curriculum and textbooks. The study was a content analysis of a corpus of 12 documents for school textbooks and curricula in biology, chemistry and physics in secondary education in grades 9 and 10, using a grid of analysis, and a detailed subdivision of the documents. The results show a weak appropriation of scientific literacy approach in the documents analyzed, contrasting with the purposes stated in the curriculum framework for science education.