Examines the effect of metadiscourse characteristics (attitudinal, voice, and informational) and level of test anxiety on students' learning from social studies textbooks. Finds high anxious students perform best with first person voice and no attitudinal metadiscourse while low anxious students showed the opposite effect. (RS)

"The Later Middle Ages: Civilization Reborn" in Ginn's "Our World," a chapter from a sixth grade social studies textbook, was assessed by the author, who used specific evaluation criteria. Although four strengths were indicated, the author dealt primarily with weaknesses of the text and made many suggestions for improvement.…

Reports the impact of metadiscourse on sixth grade students' learning and attitudes. Finds that low-comfort students learn more when informational metadiscourse is presented in interpersonal voice and high-comfort students learn less. Finds that students' attitudes are more tolerant of opinions if they read just one type of metadiscourse. (KEH)

The purpose of this paper is to make educators, authors, and publishers aware that they must be concerned with rhetorical form as well as content if they wish to present students with accessible, useful textbooks. Using a case study of textbook perception and use in a school district's sixth grade social studies classrooms, the paper illustrates…

The attitudes of grade 6 middle school students and teachers toward their social studies textbook, "American Neighbors," (Macmillan, 1980) were measured through conversations, interviews, classroom observations, questionnaires, attitude measures, student letters to textbook authors, and a metaphor task. The case study, which took place…