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…

The aim of this article is to map out the priority directions and shape the program for the development of the textbook. The tasks of adjusting the aims of education, renovating the priority directions in the selection of the content of areas of education and school subjects, and improving the tools and means, methods, and organizational forms of…

An examination of current textbooks for freshman English composition courses reveals that authors, editors, and publishers continue to perpetuate outmoded techniques which frustrate, rather than enhance, student writing ability. Most notable of these techniques is the unnecessary emphasis placed on complicated rules of grammar. Such an emphasis…

Observational studies of elementary school classrooms have indicated that basal reading programs (BRPs) influence strongly both how children are taught to read and what they read. BRPs are developed by authors working in varying degrees of involvement with the editors of educational publishing companies. Classroom observation literature and…