The purpose of this study is to analyze the nature of science reflected in the middle school first year science textbook
for the 2009 revised curriculum. For the study, four kinds of textbooks were selected and each chapter was divided into five areas,
i.e., introduction, main body, inquiry activities, reading materials, and evaluation to classify the analysis unit. The textbooks were
analyzed using the four themes of the nature of science by Lee(2013) and the explicitness of the nature of science by Kim(2010). The
results are as follows. First, the nature of science was analyzed under four themes: ‘I. nature of scientific knowledge’ was 54.3%,
while ‘II. nature of scientific inquiry’, ‘III. nature of scientific thinking’, and ‘IV. nature of interaction among science, technology,
and society’ were 27.1%, 8.8%, and 9.8%, respectively. And each theme was mainly found in the specific sub-themes. Analysis of
the textbooks by five areas showed that themes I and III were higher in the evaluation, theme II was higher in inquiry activities, and
theme IV was higher in the main body and the reading materials. Analysis by chapter showed that chapter 1 included the theme IV at
the highest ratio and in the rest of the chapters the distribution of the four themes was similar. Analysis by publisher shows that the
distributions of the four themes were similar across publishers. Second, the nature of science was implicitly presented in 99% of the
total analysis units. Especially, only chapter 1 showed explicit descriptions of the nature of science.