Mathematics curriculum has long been a topic of keen interest in mathematics education and remains a central issue in efforts to improve mathematics learning opportunities for students. This Yearbook continues in a long line of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Yearbooks that have addressed various facets of the changing mathematics…

Compares professors' ratings of the pedagogical quality of 43 introductory psychology texts with measures of 29 objective features such as manuscript length and number of references. Regression analysis showed that the 29 features predicted substantial portions of the variance in the professors' ratings. States that the comparative data may be…

Although teachers have been encouraged to use tradebooks as part of the science curriculum, not much is known about the factors--including teachers' assumptions--that influence the decisions about the books they choose to use. This paper explores some of these issues by asking groups of elementary school teachers to choose from a large set of…

A form is presented for evaluating curriculum guides which was developed to compare curriculum guides and reflect teachers' interests and values. The form helps the teacher to evaluate characteristics of the guide and the degree of importance placed on each characteristic which allows for assessment based on values. (JD)

Presents the views of three secondary-level teachers regarding the use of textbooks in geography instruction. (JDH)

Reports, from personal textbook publishing experience, that composition teachers do not want the results of research in their textbooks; they want what's familiar to them. (JL)

The premise that the "subjective" defense of literature is contributing to its demise and that responses to literature are finite and predictable to some degree is proposed. Based on this premise, criteria for selecting texts that give structure to teaching literature are presented. (HTH)

A study investigated leading mass communication scholars' opinions concerning the most influential works in their development as scholars, what books or journal articles they would recommend for aspiring scholars, and which researchers in the field are doing promising work. Fifty-one scholars identified through previous studies as being the most…

Summarizes a study involving three high school English teachers' efforts to integrate multicultural literature into the curriculum. The analysis, highlighting teachers' concerns and decisional influences, argues that teachers must not only select multicultural texts, but they must change their notions of what counts as a text and how they…

Two brief studies on community college social science textbook readability are compiled in this document. The first study compared textbook readability in 1977 to the findings of previous research. When the readability levels of community college social science textbooks were compared with the reading levels of the community college population in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the factors that have influenced the selection and the production of the literature textbooks for grades 10-12 in the public schools in Tennessee from 1951 to 1971: guidelines set up by the Tennessee State Textbook Commission and by the publishers; the adopted editions of literature textbooks listed in the…

In a two-part study to determine if an inservice education program could change attitudes toward language and behavior in teaching language, 34 secondary English teachers took a graduate level linguistics course and participated in a four-day language workshop which included the writing of a language curriculum guide. A questionnaire was then…

Discusses a study designed to explore teachers' attitudes toward text selection, focusing on text characteristics and reasons for a particular selection. (AEA)

Reports the results of an informal survey of instructors and students of astronomy and authors and editors of astronomy books. Finds that not a single instructor respondent reported being satisfied with the books themselves and not one author or editor reported being satisfied with the market. (DDR)