Science and Education Publishing American Journal of Educational Research 2327-6150 3 11 2015 11 24 Checklist for Competence-Oriented Textbooks in Science 1450 1454 EN B?lsterli Bardy Katrin Science Education, University of Teacher Education Lucerne, CH-6000 Lucerne, Switzerland EDUCATION201531116 10.12691/education-3-11-16 2015 6 15 2015 10 4 2015 11 22 Textbooks are crucial tools for implementing new curricula. Consequently, not only teachers' performance but also good textbooks have to meet certain standards to improve the quality of competence-oriented tuition. However, there are no empirical studies investigating how competence-oriented textbooks may be conceptualized or assessed. This is a major problem as many countries already implemented competence-oriented tuition or plan to do so soon. To reduce this research gap, this study investigates the following research question: Which standards should science textbooks meet in order to support competence-oriented teaching and learning in primary and secondary schools? A mixed-methods design was chosen to answer this question. First, a qualitative survey was used to formulate preliminary standards for competence-oriented textbooks. The participants of this inquiry were experienced teachers, textbook authors, publishers, science educationalists or educational scientists from three German speaking countries. These preliminary standards were validated and served to generate items for the quantitative questionnaire. In this survey, the preliminary standards were weighted according to their importance. In total, 178 primary school teachers (grades 4 to 6), 171 secondary school teachers (grades 7 to 9), and 44 science educationalists from the German speaking part of Switzerland took part. If the relevance of a standard was ambiguous, the standard was also rated qualitatively. These empirically weighted standards were used together with standards individually to be weighted to generate a checklist for Competence-Oriented TEXtbooks (COTEX). In this paper, the English version of the checklist is presented. The checklist is available online under www.schulbuchforschung.ch. COTEX can be used to conceptualize or assess competence-oriented textbooks.