Much of the attention given to literacy, of late, has focused on ensuring that students can read, without consideration to what they are given to read. Kristin Conradi Smith & Elfrieda H. Hiebert discuss four general aspects of the texts used in elementary classrooms -- text complexity, text type (narrative versus informational), text format…

International calls have been made for reasoning-and-proving to permeate school mathematics. It is important that efforts to heed this call are grounded in an understanding of the opportunities to reason-and-prove that already exist, especially in secondary-level geometry where reasoning-and-proving opportunities are prevalent but not thoroughly…

Neal Frey reads textbooks for a living, a job he finds singularly fulfilling. For more than two decades, he had labored on behalf of Educational Research Analysts, a conservative Christian textbook-reviewing organization in Longview, Texas, founded by the famously outspoken husband-and-wife team of Mel Gabler and Norma Gabler. Since the early…

Building upon past studies of curriculum textbooks in the US, this paper presents an analytical framework that classifies curriculum texts according to their representation of reconceptualized curriculum scholarship. It uses four indicators of the representation of curriculum scholarship in the analyses of eight curriculum texts published in the…

This article shows how the legitimization of the territory of a national community was going through a territorial and citizen-oriented pedagogy in which geography and history texts contributed to the elaboration of certain social representations that were part of the new Latin American nations' development process. Therefore, this paper reviews…

Textbooks for GCE Advanced Level Biology have provided over-simplified and inaccurate accounts of Charles Darwin's contribution to the study of evolution over a period of many decades. They have credited him with field skills and insight that he did not possess, and repeated several historical inaccuracies. Darwin's strength was as a synthesiser…

Although a history and systems course in psychology should provide a valuable forum for organizing the discipline, no current texts consistently provide enough coverage of the context in which the discipline emerged to anchor developments throughout the history of psychology. To test the validity of this observation, 10 undergraduate history and…

The procedures undertaken in developing and organizing skills indexes for use in coding elementary school language arts textbooks to determine what is actually taught are presented in this paper. The outlined procedures included performing a preliminary analysis on four language arts textbooks to compile an extensive list of skills and performance…

Until the end of the last century the school textbook served only one purpose, which was to educate; today, faced with competition from the media, it also must be attractive. The development of the textbook over the last century has been characterized, on one hand, by greater diversity, and hence greater complexity, in the typographical methods…

The selection of textbooks used in content analysis to determine values taught to students is important. Only widely used texts must be analyzed. The samples of U.S. history texts used by Fitzgerald (1979) and Barth and Shermis (1980) in their studies were not representative of textbooks used in schools. (RM)

The preparation of spelling skills indices, which may be used to describe the spelling content commonly taught in textbooks and the performance modes used to practice this content, is outlined in this paper. Separate sections discuss the preliminary analysis that was performed; the establishment of a Content Index that specifies major categories…

History and government textbooks provide basic sources of information about the United Nations' (UN's) role in international relations, its programs and activities throughout the world, what it stands for, and what it does. The UN embodies a vision of international cooperation that transcends domestic politics and acts as a worldwide foundation of…

Determines the extent physics textbooks contribute to physics teaching objectives and knowledge acquisition in Libya. Analysis of seventh- through ninth-grade physics textbooks and cognitive demand shows a limited effect of textbook content on knowledge acquisition and educational objectives. Suggestions are made for promoting the acquisition of…

Compares two social studies textbooks for second graders, one standard curriculum (SC) text and the other from the Core Knowledge Curriculum (CKC). It argues that the SC textbook is boring and overly simplified, while the CKC textbook is interesting and considerably more informative. It suggests that elementary school students are fully capable of…

Analyzes, from one feminist perspective, the content on women in three secondary school world history textbooks used in the United States. Results are interpreted in light of contemporary feminist themes, revealing how textbook language and content socially construct gender. Suggestions regarding the educational significance for teachers and…