Washington, D.C. - Today's high-school biology textbooks fail to make important biology ideas comprehensible and meaningful to students, according to the latest study of Project 2061, the long-term science and math education reform initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). While the high-school textbooks scored slightly higher than the middle-grades science texts evaluated by the project last year, evidence from the current study points to serious shortcomings both in content coverage and instructional design.
"In today's society, one cannot read a newspaper without recognizing the central importance of the discipline of biology to the life of every American," commented Dr. Bruce Alberts, a cell biologist who currently serves as president of the National Academy of Sciences. "Whether it is understanding new developments in health care or contributing to local environmental decisions, every citizen needs a basic understanding of the major concepts of biology, as well as an appreciation for science as a special way of knowing about our world," he said. "Sadly, it appears that our textbooks continue to be distorted by a commercial textbook market that requires that they cover the entire range of facts about biology, thereby sacrificing the opportunity to treat the central concepts in enough depth to give our students a chance to truly understand them."
"Surprisingly, although the textbooks are filled with pages of vocabulary and unnecessary detail, they provide only fragmentary treatment of some fundamentally important concepts," announced Dr. George Nelson, Director of Project 2061. "Providing bits of information about transmissions, carburetors, fuel injectors, universal joints, and cooling systems doesn't convey a sense of a car as a mode of transportation."
In this evaluation of ten widely used and newly developed biology textbooks, none was given high ratings. This is the latest in a series of Project 2061 evaluations of science and mathematics textbooks funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
"The AAAS reviews highlight some significant flaws in the math and science textbooks available to our students," said Andrea Bowden, chief of the Office for Science and Math Programs for Baltimore City Public Schools. "I'm frustrated that 15 years after the call for reform, we still don't have acceptable materials."
Bowden stated that "the AAAS evaluations have had a major influence on our selection of math and science textbooks for Baltimore's students. The evaluations produce a profile of each textbook's strengths and weaknesses across two dozen criteria. Sometimes we have been able to select textbooks with mostly high ratings, and in other cases, we have used the evaluation profiles to make more informed decisions about how to supplement the available texts."
"At their best, the textbooks are a collection of missed opportunities," according to Dr. Jo Ellen Roseman, director of the study. "While most contain the relevant content on heredity and natural selection, for example, they don't help students to learn it or help teachers to teach it. On topics such as cells and matter and energy transformations, information is presented piecemeal. In addition, the textbooks fail to convey the coherence among key ideas in biology or their connections to ideas in physical science, mathematics, and technology."
"There are some excellent teachers who compensate for the poor textbooks," Dr. Roseman said. "But this takes time and resources, often more than they have." She cited some examples of problems:
- Research shows that essentially all students-even the best and the brightest-have predictable difficulties grasping many ideas that are covered in the textbooks. Yet the textbooks fail to take these obstacles into account in designing activities and questions.
- For many biology concepts, the textbooks ignore or obscure the most important ideas by focusing instead on technical terms and trivial details (which are easy to test).
- While most of the books are lavishly illustrated, these representations are rarely helpful, because they are too abstract, needlessly complicated, or inadequately explained.
- Even though several activities are included in every chapter, students are given little guidance in interpreting the results in terms of the scientific concepts to be learned.
"Nevertheless, the evaluation did identify several materials with promising activities that could serve as starting points for future textbook development," Dr. Roseman stated. "At least half of the textbooks have some elements that are worth looking at, and these will be pointed out in the evaluation reports."
"The Project 2061 evaluation produces a great deal of detailed information that can help teachers to address the weaknesses of their textbooks," Dr. Nelson emphasized. "This information can also help materials developers and publishers who are interested in thoughtfully revising their textbooks or developing new ones." He urged educators to:
- Use some of the excellent trade books that have been published on science topics to enhance their own understanding and help them to compensate for the textbooks' lack of content coherence. Project 2061's evaluation reports, available on the project's web site later this year, will include some recommended titles.
- Study the research on student learning cited in the evaluation reports to revise classroom activities and develop new ones.
- Take advantage of professional development experiences that focus not only on increasing teachers' knowledge of key biology ideas, but also on strategies for teaching those ideas more effectively.
- Encourage the National Science Foundation to support a new round of curriculum development focused on creating a coherent picture of key ideas for specific biology topics, using a research-based development and testing process to ensure that the instructional strategies promote learning the key ideas.
"We have been gratified to hear from school officials around the country who report that our previous evaluations are providing valuable information for textbook adoption decisions," said Dr. Nelson. "We're continuing to work with educators to create a demand for effective textbooks that will, in turn, encourage developers and publishers to respond."
Later this year, Project 2061 will convene curriculum developers, publishers, scientists and mathematicians, and educators to plan a strategy for improving textbooks over the next five years. The project is also seeking funds to analyze elementary school materials and to update its database of evaluations on middle- and high-school topics.
About the Evaluation
Two independent teams of biology teachers, science curriculum specialists, and professors of science education evaluated each biology text, along with its teacher guide. The evaluation examines how well the texts are likely to help students learn the important ideas and skills in the widely accepted Benchmarks for Science Literacy (developed earlier by Project 2061) and in the National Science Education Standards. This approach to evaluation was conceived and developed with funding from the National Science Foundation. The evaluation reports will be published on the Project 2061 web site at www.project2061.org later this year.
The evaluation included the following biology textbooks (in alphabetical order):
Biology (Miller Levine). Prentice Hall, 1998
Biology: A Community Context. South-Western Educational Publishing, 1998
Biology: Principles & Explorations. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1998
Biology: The Dynamics of Life. Glencoe, McGraw-Hill, 2000
Biology: Visualizing Life. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1998
BSCS Biology: A Human Approach. Kendall Hunt, 1997
BSCS Biology: An Ecological Approach. Kendall Hunt, 1998
Heath Biology. D.C. Heath and Company, 1991
Insights in Biology. Kendall Hunt, 1998
Modern Biology. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1999
For an explanation of the key ideas used for the evaluation of the textbooks, click here.
For an explanation of the criteria used by the researchers for evaluating the textbooks' quality of instructional support, click here .
A PDF document with charts and more information related to this release can be downloaded here . (You will need Adobe Acrobat to view this file.)
Beginning in 1985, Project 2061 has worked to reform science education in grades K-12 so that all high-school graduates become science literate‹that is, prepared to live interesting, responsible, and productive lives in a world increasingly shaped by science and technology. The initiative has developed a variety of tools and training for educators to support efforts to translate the established learning goals into classroom activities. Previous evaluations and information for educators and parents can be found at the project's web site at www.project2061.org .