Comparison of Student Roles Described in Elementary-School Mandarin Textbooks Released by Different Publishers between 1990 and 2010

This study compares how often the role of students appeared in Mandarin textbooks used in elementary schools after the implementation of the opening up policy. Using the content analysis method, the role of student was identified a total of 1916 times in these textbooks. The data were subsequently analyzed by frequency and Chi-square test and calculated on SPSS for Windows 14.0. The findings of this study are summarized as follows: 1. Although each version is unique in its own way, all the textbooks after the opening up policy were identical in ranking in three dimensions of student role. This study clearly indicates that the knowledge map in student role was not re-constructed after the implementation of the opening up policy for textbook.2. The number of times three student-role categories were not significantly different among the versions published in the 1990s. Posterior to publishers’ re-vision, however, different versions published between 1990 and 2010 had different frequencies to describe three student-role categories. Recommendations from this study are also offered.