In Hungary primary and secondary schools and teachers can only use textbooks enlisted on the list of certified/confirmed textbooks provided by the Educational Authority. Textbooks have to go through a thorough accreditation process to be included on the list, in which at least two independent experts give opinions about the book using a detailed evaluation questionnaire. Examples for questions are the overall quality of the content, the scientific correctness of it, about the appropriateness of the terminology used in the book, the feasibility of the content and structure for learning and teaching purposes for the intended age and grade, the relation with the National Core Curriculum or the language quality. Our research aims to make a different perspective to established textbook evaluation processes in Hungary in two ways. First, it intends to concentrate on features enhancing effective teaching and learning based on the latest research on the field of science education. Second, we intend to use quantitative and objective measures wherever possible to allow for detailed description and comparability across textbooks. In an international context, although the relevance of textbooks as teaching resources has been decreasing, they still influence teaching and learning and are inevitable parts of reform and interventions programmes. Students’ books play a role as interfaces between educational policy and practice, national and enacted curriculum, a mediator of new contents and strategies to help change teachers’ practices, differentiate teaching and learning, resource of lesson planning, and support of reducing time spent on preparation for or organization of the lesson. Our aim for the first half of 2018 is to code and evaluate four different 7th grade textbooks in Physics – three from Hungary and one from England. For the first three categories of evaluation, (1) content, (2) learning and teaching, (3) structure and organization we chose the chapters regarding thermodynamics, for (4) language, and (5) textbook layout we additionally selected ten random pages from all over the textbooks to use as the subject of evaluation. Based on experience from the test we will make modifications to and finalize the analytical frame and coding manual.

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