Provides British elementary and middle grade teachers with guidelines for teaching about minorities, as well as for judging and taking action on bias in school books. (Editor/SJL)

Presents ideas and activities to be used in a course on the history and systems of psychology. Explains that the students prepared topic summaries to demonstrate knowledge rather that formal testing. Describes projects such as a reaction journal, intellectual genealogy, textbook comparison, and multiple timelines. (DK)

A preliminary set of principles of judging the pedagogical utility of proposed grammar rules is offered. The goal is the inclusion in teaching materials of only those rules which are linguistically accurate, pedagogically sound, and relevant to specified instructional objectives. (Author)

In the fall of 1984, the Education Commission of the States (ECS) was awarded a grant from the U.S. Secretary of Education's Discretionary Fund to identify alternative state roles for improving instructional materials in mathematics. To help state leaders define an appropriate and effective role in upgrading these materials, ECS proposed first to…

Contends that the standard description of the relationship between the long-run marginal cost curve and the short-run marginal cost curve is often misleading and imprecise. Asserts that a sampling of college-level textbooks confirms this confusion. Provides a definition and instructional strategy that can be used to promote student understanding…

This report describes a project which analyzed science and social studies textbooks to determine how well they accommodate the learning needs of mainstreamed hard-to-teach students. A textbook analysis tool was developed, and eight teacher-reviewers examined the instructional design of teachers' and students' editions of 12 leading elementary and…

In a "College English" article, B. M. Kroll describes the educational and philosophical foundations of three perspectives on the teaching of writing: interventionism, maturationism, and interactionism. These three developmental perspectives offer a useful way of reviewing, evaluating, and classifying textbooks written for basic writers.…

Discusses how most study skills are not appropriate for reading social studies textbooks. Asserts that sophisticated readers of social studies textbooks use a nation schema to organize the information. Finally, provides specific instructions on how to use a nation schema to teach social studies. (SRT)

Proposing two major shifts in how to involve low readers more effectively in textbook learning, this book suggests that students, even those with low reading skills, can learn to use mainstream textbooks, and that textbooks can be designed to make them more usable for all students. The book presents a series of instructional techniques that…

Roosevelt is usually described as a liberal, but a number of recent books see him as essentially conservative. Suggests how these books can be used to study the New Deal era and the concepts of liberal and conservative. Comparative analysis could structure the teaching unit. (CS)

Discusses an analysis of 10 common introductory psychology textbooks. Argues that the books tend to present psychology as tedious, even silly, and as a canned, multimedia, self-teaching program. Concludes that replacing textbooks with lectures based on the instructor's personal knowledge and experience would improve the teaching of psychology. (SG)

To help students understand cultural differences, a seventh-grade social studies teacher devised a unit on ethnocentrism among the Iroquois Indians and on textbook bias toward ethnic groups in general and toward the Iroquois in particular. Six textbook excerpts are presented and activities based on the excerpts are suggested. (DB)

In the "real" world of writing, people make writing decisions based in part on their analyses of audience expectations and their own purposes. Yet, composition teachers at all levels assign general or abstract topics for essays rather than create writing tasks that require students to reflect on target audiences. Even students are aware…

Students in a teaching methods course evaluated a recently published basal reader to see if it conformed to guidelines for the efficacy of such materials already established by the class. A story selection was read to identify (1) essential background information, (2) text features that might cause comprehension problems (subject matter for…

Considers the ubiquitous use of textbooks in social studies classrooms and recommends constructing critical-thinking exercises revealing textual bias. Suggested exercises concern issues of emotional or ambiguous language, geographic and cultural inclusion/exclusion, and accuracy of data. Includes several examples of critical-thinking activities.…