Analysis of the relativistic dynamics approach in high school and university textbooks

Abstract

School books are a central element of the didactic transposition (Chevallard, 1985). However, transpositive phenomena are not evident to science communicators at all levels: neither to those who write the books, nor to users, teachers and students.This research studies the main justifications for revising the classical concepts of Momentum, Mass and Energy, in the teaching of relativistic dynamics in 18 secondary and basic university textbooks. An inductive categorization is carried out analyzing the influence of the educational level to which the texts are directed in the justifications for the review of classical dynamics and its strategies, in addition to characterizing the use of experiments, images, and the relevance of studying the relativistic dynamics exposed by the different texts.