PHYSICAL AND CHEMICAL CHANGE IN TEXTBOOKS: TWENTY YEARS ON! David. F. Treagust and Bill Palmer Curtin University ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to revisit the topic of physical and chemical change about which a paper ‘Physical and chemical change in textbooks: an initial view’ by David Treagust and Bill Palmer was published in Research in Science Education (RISE) in 1996. Bill published a number of papers in this area and successfully presented a thesis entitled ‘ A study of teaching and learning about the paradoxical concept of physical and chemical change’ in 2003. The thesis has remained largely unnoticed, but the 1996 paper has attracted a little attention (21 citations). This study will discuss what new ideas have been put forward by the papers citing the 1996 paper and survey the literature since 1996 on physical and chemical change. The question being asked is ‘Should physical and chemical change still be taught in schools? The answer would still appear indefinite with the age of the students and their country of origin being major considerations. INTRODUCTION Twenty years ago (in 1996) Bill Palmer (Bill) and David Treagust (David) published a paper entitled ‘Physical and chemical change in textbooks: an initial view’ in Research in Science Education. Twenty years later we wondered if there had been any change in views worldwide about whether the term ‘physical and chemical change’ should or should not be taught in schools. Firstly, we should explain that there is a large divergence of view about the usage of the expression ‘physical and chemical change’. On one extreme is the group who have used the expression in chemistry teaching for their entire teaching career and believe that it offers a huge variety of colourful and interesting experiments that will excite and entertain beginning students in a way that will keep them involved with studying chemistry. For this group, physical and chemical change are quite distinct phenomena and students should be able to distinguish the two types of change from each other clearly and without mistake. At the other end of the spectrum of views, there are those who agree that chemical change or chemical reaction is a quite distinct entity. However, they consider that there should be no separate category of physical change, particularly not in the form of a contrasting (dichotomous) pair with chemical change. They maintain that what had been defined as physical change should be called as what it is; it may be a change of state (phase change) or a change from being magnetised to not being magnetised or of having greater or less kinetic energy. Dissolving substances in a solvent and changing elements from one allotrope to another allotrope have sometimes been described as physical changes. Considerable caution is necessary in these cases. Between these positions there is a wide variety of positions that chemistry teachers may adopt. WHAT VIEW DID THE 1996 PAPER ADOPT? The first point made in the paper entitled ‘Physical and chemical change in textbooks: an initial view’ (Palmer & Treagust, 1996) was that all chemistry textbooks overtly or covertly imply