Language functions are often used as fundamental guiding principles in ESL (English as a Second Language) textbooks especially now that focus on meaning has become crucial to ESL teaching and learning. This paper identifies general and specific language functions used in five beginner ESL textbooks to provide baseline data that will guide…

To provide more affordable course content to our students and faculty, local data on how students perceive textbook expenses and how the costs impact student success would be necessary in order to advocate to faculty and other stakeholders. This survey, conducted at a mid-sized research public institution, aims to explore student perceptions of…

There is a marked tendency in educational research to marginalise the written word, and to be wary of what I here call its 'writerliness': its capacity to go beyond the prosaic and the utilitarian, where meaning is understood largely in terms of the success of language in reflecting reality. I note various symptoms of this in the world of…

The activity described in this paper is based on the idea that reading an introductory undergraduate mathematics text is similar to reading instructions. I want my students to think about how to read when the goal is to learn to complete a task. I give them written instructions for doing a card trick and ask them to complete the trick. The…

This paper reports on findings from an analysis of trait-formation tasks in the genetic sections of high school biology textbooks. Drawing on studies exploring a range of problems in students' explanations of trait formation, we investigated trait-formation tasks and analysed their potential for knowledge integration and multi-level mechanistic…

Purpose: Elementary school students are expected to participate in science learning settings that place high demands on skill with certain types of grammatical structures, including complex sentences. This research note aims to clarify the types of complex sentences that are evident in a general education science curriculum across the elementary…

Among many variables associated with the chaos and stress of the pandemic, a lack of direct access to learning materials like textbooks has arisen as one of the major roadblocks to student learning in the era of COVID-19. This nation has continued to observe a sharp rise in textbook prices since 1977, which leaves many students enrolled at…

India presents a heterogeneous socio-economic ethos, rooted within structures of patriarchy and caste, rendering any transformation of traditional gender roles, increasingly challenging. Gender socialisation begins in childhood and is assimilated through schools. Students imbibe gender concepts through textbooks and classroom experiences, which…

In this paper we discuss findings of a study that investigated the resources and language that teachers in Malawi use to teach the concept of zero. In Malawi primary schools, textual resources available to teachers are mainly the curriculum materials in the form of syllabus, teacher guides and learner textbooks. The syllabus and teacher guides are…

The current study examined the use of electronic textbooks designed as mobile applications for learning vocabulary in English among Iranian university students. To this end, 95 university students in an experimental (N = 50) and a control group (N = 45) participated in the study. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design was employed and over…

"Representational transformation diagrams" are used to compare and contrast standard textbook presentations of vector line integrals in undergraduate courses in both mathematics and physics. These presentations are taken as the lower anchor in a learning trajectory. Two principal approaches in the lower division are identified, roughly…

This study examined a network of concepts used in the curriculum, textbooks, instruction, and assessment in relation to somatic cell division and investigated the alignment of science concepts used in them. Textbooks and teachers' instruction and evaluation questions were collected to analyse the alignment between the concepts and the conceptual…

At the time of the current global energy crisis energy awareness education in school is increasingly important. Textbooks directly helping and influencing learning play an important role in this, especially in the case of natural sciences. Thus, the aim of this research was to show how science textbooks help to educate energy awareness (EA).…

Grant programs that foster the use of open educational resources (OER) significantly reduce undergraduate student spending on textbooks per semester. The Zero-Cost Course Materials (ZCCM) grant program at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced), eliminated text costs and ensured access to course materials by replacing required commercial…

This article contributes to debates on how the history curriculum should be organised (i.e., thematically, or chronologically). It also contributes to the limited empirical research that employs a sociocultural approach to history education and the limited empirical research on history education in Singapore. Drawing on semistructured interviews…