Our Evolving Curriculum

Part I: A Special Issue of Peabody Journal of Education

Allan C. Ornstein, Linda S. Behar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135490492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is Volume 69 Number 3, Spring 1994 edition of the Peabody Journal of Education that offers Part 1 of a collection of works on the evolving curriculum. With topics that cover the need for reform, teacher's use of curriculum knowledge, productive curriculum time and multicultural schooling.

The Textbook-Driven Curriculum

Allan C. Ornstein

Textbooks have come to drive the curriculum, and one might wonder why so little attention is given to the position of the textbook in the process of curriculum making. Reliance on the textbook (as well as its companion, the workbook) is consistent with the stress on written words as the main medium of education, as well as the way many teachers themselves were educated. Dependence on the textbook is also linked to the time when a majority of teachers were poorly prepared in subject matter or teaching out of license and read the text one day in advance of the students. Many of today’s teachers, while better educated than their predecessors, sometimes lack the time or training to prepare new materials; thus, they continue to rely on the textbook and workbook.

Characteristics of Textbooks

Good textbooks have many desirable characteristics. They are usually well organized, coherent, unified, relatively up-to-date, accurate, and relatively unbiased. They have been scrutinized by scholars, educators, and minority groups. Their reading level and knowledge base match the developmental level of their intended audience. They are accompanied by teacher’s manuals, test items, study guides, and activity guides. The textbook is an acceptable tool for instruction as long as it is selected with care and is kept in proper perspective so that it is not viewed as the only source of knowledge, and it does not turn into the curriculum.

On the other hand, critics have found that textbooks in nearly every subject and grade level cover too many topics, the writing is superficial, choppy, and lacking in depth and breadth (the phenomenon is called “mentioning”), and content wanders between the important and the trivial. They fail to capture the imagination and interest of the students or to make students think and spurn current knowledge about cognitive information and linguistic processing. The so-called best textbooks are often designed to entertain and to be decorative, but they provide only tidbits of information, lack adequate integration of subject matter, and do not stretch the student’s mind. They are unintentionally geared to oversimplify and to limit thinking (see Table 1). Teachers have contributed to the problem, since most teachers emphasize answers to be found, not problems to be solved or thinking processes to be used.

Table 1

Appraising the Worth of a Textbook

CONTENT
1.	Does the text coincide with the content and objectives of the course?
2.	Is it up-to-date and accurate?
3.	Is it comprehensive?
4.	Is it adaptable to the students’ needs, interests, and abilities?
5.	Does it adequately and properly portray minorities and women?
6.	Does it foster methodological approaches consistent with procedures used by the teacher and school?
7.	Does it reinforce the type of learning (such as critical thinking and problem solving) sought by the teacher and school?
8.	Does it provide the student with a sense of accomplishment because it can be mastered and is still challenging?
MECHANICS
1.	Is the size appropriate?
2.	Is the binding adequate?
3.	Is the paper of adequate quality?
4.	Are the objectives, headings, and summaries clear?
5.	Are the contents and index well organized?
6.	Is there a sufficient number of pictures, charts, maps, and so on, appropriate for the students’ level?
7.	Does it come with instructional manuals and study guides?
8.	Is it durable enough to last several years?
9.	Is it reasonably priced relative to its quality? To its competitors?
OVERALL APPRAISAL
1.	What are the outstanding features of the text?
2.	What are the shortcomings of the text?
3.	Do the outstanding features strongly override the shortcomings?

Source: Ornstein, A. C. (1992). Secondary and middle school teaching methods. New York: Harper Collins, p. 419.

Text Instruction

Bennett (1984), and Bennet and Carre (1993), analyzed 417 language and math tasks assigned in texts by teachers and found that 60% were practice tasks or content already known to the students. New tasks accounted for 25%, and tasks requiring students to discover, invent, or develop a new concept or problem made up 7% of the tasks. In another study (Mergendoller et al., 1988), approximately 84 % of the teachers rely on textually explicit instruction, a method of using printed material in which a correct answer can be obtained by selecting verbatim information from the textbook or workbook. Rarely do teachers employ textually implicit instruction, in which a correct answer requires students to make an inference from the textual information supplied. Even more rarely do they use scripturally implicit instruction, in which a correct answer requires students to go beyond the information given and call on prior knowledge and reasoning skills.

Most teachers are right-answer oriented in their teaching and testing. Hence, they are unwilling or unable to change from textbooks that are characterized by low-level cognitive demands and are divorced from how students think or reason. One might expect at least science teachers to exhibit textually implicit or scripturally implicit instruction, since they deal with scientific problems and laboratory experiments, yet the above conclusions were based on observations of seventh grade science classes.

Teachers of mathematics, especially at the upper elementary and junior high school grades, are not much different. Some data strongly suggest that many of these teachers don’t know mathematics. Many assign the basic problems but skip word problems because word problems are harder to teach.

Readability and Comprehension

Concern about student reading problems has prompted educators to identify textbooks and other reading materials that are suitable for specific student populations, especially below-average readers. Reading formulas, first devised in the 1920s to estimate the reading difficulty of a text, have increased and are widely used by authors, publishers, teachers, reading consultants, and textbook adoption committees.

Some reading formulas count the number of syllables or the number of letters in a word, some count the number of words not on a specific word list, others measure sentence length, and still others remove words in a passage and test whether students can fill in the exact word that was removed. Some formulas use graphs, regression statistics, and percentiles and range scores to calculate reading difficulty, and computer programs are now available for doing the counting and calculation chores involved in reading level determinations.

Some educators now argue that comprehendability, not readability, is the major criterion to consider when adopting a text. Comprehension entails a number of elements: coherence, sequence, matching, transitions, and self-monitoring.

Coherence enhances comprehension. It suggests that readers organize text information according to either the text knowledge or their own background knowledge. Tighter linkages between text knowledge and the reader’s background knowledge improve comprehension. Texts that develop information through matrices, hierarchies, and categories are more coherent than texts that present information in topical, chronological, or list form.

Sequence connotes how students move from original understandings toward new understandings. A well-organized text moves the reader along a continuum from novice to expert. Linear sequences are much more common in texts than branching sequences (Calfee & Chambliss, 1987; Chambliss & Calfee, 1989). Linear sequences are easier for readers to understand, but they lead to compartmentalization and isolation of information. Branc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Beyond Tyler and Taba: Reconceptualizing the Curriculum Process
• The Toll for Curriculum Reform
• Teachers, Public Life, and Curriculum Reform
• Teachers’ Use of Curriculum Knowledge
• The Textbook-Driven Curriculum
• Productive Curriculum Time
• Multicultural Schooling: Developing a Curriculum for the Real World