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Previous research about the presence of nature of science (NOS) within science textbooks has been found to be lacking in sufficient coverage. However, given the shift in how scholars conceive of NOS, the shortcomings may not be present in the textbooks but rather in the NOS frameworks used to analyze textbooks. Whereas traditional NOS has taken a more generalized approach to describing scientific practices, the family resemblance approach (FRA) to NOS recognizes variability in the scientific disciplines as reported by practicing scientists as well as philosophers and historians of science. Instead of suggesting that NOS can be applied equally in educational settings to all scientific disciplines, the FRA accounts for cognitive-epistemic and social-instructional conceptual elements which more authentically represent science. This study sought to evaluate textbooks using this more recent NOS conceptualization to explore the potential range of NOS aspects.Using the proposed FRA categories, seven German biology textbooks were analyzed with qualitative content analysis.The combination of cognitive-epistemic and socialinstitutional systems of science revealed that the FRA

Studies on the quality of nature of science (NOS) representations in school science textbooks report them being mostly of implicit manner and not fully adequate. However, the often underlying NOS framework of the consensus list in these studies is criticized as undifferentiated and inadequate. The family resemblance approach (FRA) to NOS shows potential to give differentiated insights into the appropriateness of NOS representations with avoidance of specifying certain philosophical directions. Based on a fine-grained differentiated FRA category system (11 main categories, e.g., “knowledge”; 52 subcategories, e.g., “hypotheses”), the quality of cognitive-epistemic NOS representations identified in seven biology school textbooks from Germany was analyzed. For this, a category system was developed. Cognitive-epistemic NOS representations in four chapters of each of the seven textbooks were evaluated regarding manner (implicit, explicit) and adequacy (adequate, (partly) not adequate). Results indicate, among others, that explicit representations of the cognitive-epistemic system of science were mainly placed in the introduction chapters, whereas subject-related chapters include mostly implicit representations. In this article, we present the evaluation of the quality of cognitive-epistemic NOS representations and discuss implications for science education.