Analysis of the Chemistry activities in 1st level of Spanish Bachelor Physics and Chemistry textbooks from a «Chemistry in context» approach

In the last few years there are two worrying phenomenon happening in the science teaching environment, on one hand there are fewer students who choose science subjects at the time they’re optional and on the other hand the decreasing number of university students enrolled in science careers, if we add those two facts the results of the latest pisa tests, which show that students who choose these materials do not get satisfactory results, we have a hopeless outlook. One way of analysing the situation is exploring what happens in the classroom and in this context we find that the textbook is a resource used extensively in the teaching of Chemistry; one essential element for learning are planned activities in the classroom, so it seems essential to make a full review of them. The objectives in this study are: Analysing and classifying the activities contextualized of chemistry textbooks currently used in eleventh grade and comparing books from different educational laws based on their contextualized activities. For the review and classification of activities it uses a methodology of analysis for qualitative content. The results demonstrate the anecdotic presence of this kind of activities in textbooks; 8308 activities were reviewed of which only 6,46% corresponded to contextualized activities. In addition when comparing the different books, whether they are currently used or the ones from previous educational laws, we see that there is not a turnaround in what refers to the contextualized activities, as a significant variation is not observed in the percentages and therefore do not adapt well to curriculum changes.