Taxonomy of Biochemistry External Representations Applied to Biochemistry Textbooks

Several studies have looked at the impact of representations on students understand of biochemistry and the types of representations used to teach and assess biochemistry concepts. No study to date has looked at the representations available to both instructors and students in the textbook. This study analyzed the representations in the top three purchased one‐semester biochemistry textbooks on Amazon in spring 2015. After establishing inter‐rater reliability, all representations were coded according to the Taxonomy of Biochemistry External Representations (TOBER) as symbolic, macroscopic, particulate, microscopic, or schematic. Analysis of the representations show specific patterns regardless of textbook in the representations used to teach specific content with little use of representations of application such as those of at the macroscopic level.